As I mentioned a few days ago, I was in the market for a new laptop and was mostly looking at Windows machines until I realised that there was no good reason why I shouldn't buy a MacBook Pro instead. I decided to take the plunge and I ordered the 15" model, which arrived yesterday.

I've been developing on Intel machines since 1989, starting out with DOS and then working my way through Windows 3.1, 2000, NT, XP and Vista so to switch to a different OS is a bit of a leap of faith. From time to time I had considered installing linux on a laptop but frankly it is too time consuming to get things working and I have precious little time as it is.

The main attraction of moving to Mac OS X is that it is linux based and I can now use many of the same commands on my development machine as I use on the environments I deploy to. I also like the fact that the hardware and software have been produced by the same company and should therefore provide a stable and optimized platform.

The install experience was easily the best I have experienced on any computer. I was able to check out a couple of Java project from subversion and get them building with minimal fuss. The MacBook Pro built one of the projects about 25% faster than my Windows Vista desktop machine which on paper has a better spec, so Mac OS X does appear to be more efficient.

I love the fact that there is a DVI port built in and this gives a crisp image when connected to my 24" Samsung monitor. The MagSafe power adaptor was a bit of an experience. I'm not ashamed to admit that I had to search on Google to find out how I was supposed to disconnect it.

I've installed vmware fusion (an impressive piece of software) and I have a Windows XP and a Fedora 8 virtual machine, primarily for running unit tests on those platforms.

It will take me a couple of days to get used to the keyboard but as this will be my only machine on a trip to Colorado next week I'll be forced to get up to speed quickly.

I'm extremely impressed so far!

I have the opportunity to buy a new laptop and I have a budget of £1,500 (plus VAT). My main requirements are decent processing power (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo + 4GB RAM) and a good quality high resolution display (ideally WUXGA 1920x1200) and a keyboard that it suited to development work (so functions like 'home' and 'end' can't involve complex multi-key actions involving several keys at the same time).

My initial shortlist included the Lenovo Thinkpad T61p, the Dell Precision M6300, and the Sony Vaio AR61ZU. I was pretty much settled on the Sony although I was concerned that this might be a bit larger than I really wanted due to the 17" display. I've now realised that the MacBook Pro is also a contender so I now have to choose between that and the Sony Vaio (which is pretty much the Apple of the PC world).

Apart the basics of email and web, I'll be using the machine for Java development work 90% of the time and the tools I use are available on all platforms. The only Microsoft specific tools I need to use are Word and Excel. They are both available on the Mac, at a price. I guess there's always the option of using OpenOffice but I don't know how well that really works, especially with Office 2007 files.

The MacBook Pro is probably the better choice for development work given that the OS is linux based (most of the development work I do is targeted at unix or linux production environments).

It's a tough call. Suggestions anyone?

Labels: hardware