Well it’s only 6 months until my birthday and 9 months until Christmas so I’m knocking together my birthday/xmas list. Top of the list is going to be a MacBook Pro. There’s a couple of reasons for this:
- Portability
- Security
- Style
As far as portability goes, I’m not fussed about weight, dimensions or battery life when it comes to choosing a laptop since I don’t do that much travelling, I’m usually not too far from a power point and I’d rather have a full sized keyboard than a laptop that would fit in my pocket.
What I am more concerned about is being able to do some work wherever I am. For me this means being able to write a PHP script, test it on a development server running L.A.M.P and then finally uploaded to one of our production servers. This is easy enough to get up and running on a Windoze laptop as there are XP versions of the W.A.M.P components (and for Vista too) but the problem is that a lot of what I develop interacts with the Linux operating system in some way.
For this reason I usually need to be on a network with a Linux box. If I had a MacBook Pro, I could just turn it on wherever I was, have all my files permenantly stored locally running on L.A.M.P. so I can develop, test and then use whatever internet connection is near by to upload them and then run a quick live test. Simple.
The other good thing is that there are Mac versions of all the major bits of software I use (FireFox, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, … iTunes) and for the few bits that don’t have Mac versions, there’s something that’s easily as good if not better. Perfick.
As far as the second point goes, the only reason I can think of to upgrade to Vista and finally get away from XP is security. Apparently Vista will be a lot better than XP, but it’s still going to be the focus of every nasty thats created. Why not switch to something that is not only based upon a secure operating system to start with, but has been improved upon as well.
Finally, style. This is a bit of a no-brainer. Considering they are a computer company in essence, there’s got to be very few companies in the world that can claim to be as stylish. People don’t buy iPods because they prefer the AAC format after all. And yes, Vista might be full of new eye candy, but even after ditching the playmobile themes Microsoft will always be playing catch-up with Apple.
Time to start saving!