I had been using a Panasonic Toughbook W2 for about 6 years and it was a great machine for that time.  It was light (3 lbs), fairly full featured and robust.  But of course it ran Windows with all the problems that entails.  So I had been wanting to switch to a Mac for a while, but all the MacBooks were too heavy.  Then came the Air, but it made too many compromises for someone who was hoping to keep this new machine for another 5-6 year (sealed battery?).  Now I am writing this on my brand spanking new 13.5 inch MacBook. 

I love everything about it except for the extra pound I am now lugging around.  Given my plan for longterm ownership, I splurged a bit and got 4GB of RAM and the 128GB SSD.  I am extremely happy with both choices.  I run Parallels and have given it 1GB of RAM for a WindowsXP instance on which I have Outlook and the rest of Microsoft Office.  In Coherence mode, those appear as applications in the OS X dock.  Performance is significantly better than my old machine.  Load times for applications off the SSD are lightning fast and I can boot the machine in about 35 seconds (wake up from sleep is instantaneous).

I have started to add some development stuff also.  It was nice to find Apache 2 and PHP 5 pre-installed.  After installing MySQL it took only a few minutes of poking around to figure out how to change the configuration (change a socket) to work with  the setup already on the machine.   Trying out Cornerstone as a visual Subversion client (yes I should switch to git, but can only do so many switches at once) and Cyberduck for SCP and other file transfer.  Now just have to figure out which editor I want to use.

All in all it took me a lot less time to get up and running than I had feared.  Now just have to plug a few little holes, such as getting some of my Firefox Extensions back.

I had been using a Panasonic Toughbook W2 for about 6 years and it was a great machine for that time.  It was light (3 lbs), fairly full featured and robust.  But of course it ran Windows with all the problems that entails.  So I had been wanting to switch to a Mac for a while, but all the MacBooks were too heavy.  Then came the Air, but it made too many compromises for someone who was hoping to keep this new machine for another 5-6 year (sealed battery?).  Now I am writing this on my brand spanking new 13.5 inch MacBook. 

I love everything about it except for the extra pound I am now lugging around.  Given my plan for longterm ownership, I splurged a bit and got 4GB of RAM and the 128GB SSD.  I am extremely happy with both choices.  I run Parallels and have given it 1GB of RAM for a WindowsXP instance on which I have Outlook and the rest of Microsoft Office.  In Coherence mode, those appear as applications in the OS X dock.  Performance is significantly better than my old machine.  Load times for applications off the SSD are lightning fast and I can boot the machine in about 35 seconds (wake up from sleep is instantaneous).

I have started to add some development stuff also.  It was nice to find Apache 2 and PHP 5 pre-installed.  After installing MySQL it took only a few minutes of poking around to figure out how to change the configuration (change a socket) to work with  the setup already on the machine.   Trying out Cornerstone as a visual Subversion client (yes I should switch to git, but can only do so many switches at once) and Cyberduck for SCP and other file transfer.  Now just have to figure out which editor I want to use.

All in all it took me a lot less time to get up and running than I had feared.  Now just have to plug a few little holes, such as getting some of my Firefox Extensions back.