Well, I finally caved in and picked up a MacBook Pro for my business, and I must say that it truly is a work of art!
Next to ThinkPad’s for quality laptop builds (all my previous laptops), MacBook Pro’s are by far the most impressive in build, design and elegance. Definitely kudos on the hardware and system features – and double kudos on the built-in camera, dashboard, bluetooth and juicy CPU and hard drive.
The experience of switching over has been rough – from keyboard shortcuts to applications, and mouse clicks to common tasks. Although I have not switched over completely, and highly recommend against a complete switchover, I am finding the Mac OS experience to be very impressive and powerful. Expose is great, window management is slick, everything looks nice and clean, and the human-to-computer interaction seems seamless and super user friendly most of the time (much like my iPhone).
To counter the complex experience of switching, I opted to install VMWare Fusion (reports show that it performs better than Parallels – lighter overhead on the OS, and faster performance). On that I am running Windows XP Pro SP2, and all my Web development applications (Visual Studio, IIS etc.). There is no way I would have been able to switch over completely, even with the open source Web development applications out there (e.g. eclipse, mono etc.). Additionally, I picked up ConceptDraw to support some of my Visio work, however I still have Visio installed on my VMWare image just in case.
Besides the extreme learning curve of having to learn to do things in a new way, I gotta give it up to Apple for creating such an amazing product with a very reliable and impressive OS.
Time to stop by the Genius Bar to bulk up on some knowledge so I can use this puppy to its maximum potential!
