Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I finally pulled the trigger and bought two MacBook machines recently. I Was replacing a Dell laptop anyway, then found deals in the Mac "refurb" section (always good deals there, stuff is just like new, same warranty, etc) and just decided it was time, past time.

My kids have had older iMac machines, because I am a cheap bastard and snagged them for next to nothing on eBay, for years. I really like OS X, because of the BSD/Unix core, and just finally decided it was time to get a grown up computer.

I have to say so far so good. The 13" MacBook is a bit smaller than I am used to but other than that, and a few keyboard quirks, it is really really nice to be using one. (I hate the function key being absolute bottom left, instead of control, that is my emacs do everything key, and it drives my pinky batty to have to move over one, but I am trying to learn. I am also not a fan of delete meaning backspace and having no "real" delete.)

Performance on the 2GhZ Core Due with Eclipse, FireFox, iTunes, NeoOffice, etc is all adequate but not screaming (think I need more than the 512MB RAM I currently have, maybe that will help - though I have to admit, I only had 512 on my last Windows laptop and it still ran all that stuff fine [it also had a separate 128MB video card - unlike the MacBook which shares vid memory]).

The machine itself is really slick, sleek and well put together, but that goes without saying I suppose. I like the form factor/size of the case, the magnetic latch for the screen (so far, because I have not had it drop open or get bent, etc, yet) and I also appreciate the magnetic power connector (saved me once already).

OS X with Dashboard, Spotlight and so on is also very nice, I do prefer it over Windows (even when trying to use an open mind about it, it is just more intuitive). What I would say was the final reason I decided to do this, is that I wanted a nice GUI OS that is a bit less "work" than desktop Linux (especially on a laptop) when it comes to getting and keeping things running *and* I still wanted an actual shell for scripting, grep/sed/awk, running unix tools, java development, etc (and I hate bolt on stuff like Cygwin, yeah it works, it just annoys me).

So from here on out its MacBook time, and yes, I did pay the "black tax."