After the price cut following the MacBook Air announcement at MacWorld + buying refurbished I was able to find a 2.2GHz Macbook Pro that was only about $2-300 more than a comparable PC. That was pretty much worth it for me. Ninety percent of the PC laptops these days are going to stick you with some mutation of Vista, and having Unix without having to worry about hardware compatibilities was a big plus. Also, it will facilitate any tech support I do for my parents.
It'll leave me running a 3 OS network (4 if I ever boot that Indigo2 again), which has pros and cons.
Obviously there wasn't much setup to do, but I did spend most of the day loading free software onto it (after downloading a significant number of updates). To wit:
- Firefox, though I'm trying out Safari
- NeoOffice, OpenOffice for the Mac, not using X11
- The GIMP, alas still wedded to X11
-
Eclipse, for coding (hey, Mac OS 10.5 has Subversion!)
- EasyEclipse for PHP, I haven't tried either of these out yet
- EasyEclipse for PHP
- MacPorts, I didn't use this for the GIMP, but did for ImageMagick
- XCode, note: pretty much nothing will download properly from MacPorts unless you have XCode installed
- Acrobat Reader, Apple's Preview never seems to be quite sufficient
All of this really so that I can be online even when I'm doing laundry (the built-in AirPort card has much better reception than the PCI card I had for the G4 Powerbook, even after I'd added the antenna).
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