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.
