Move to Apple hardware

Time for a new laptop was on me and I have been weighing up on which piece of hardware to get. Basically I was considering another Sony Vaio, a Dell, possibly an ASUS and a Mac.

I pretty much discounted Sony as I was not happy with my last purchase which was a Sony. It is hard to put my finger on it but the whole experience was not quite right. It was light, fairly quick had quite a nice screen, but it had quirks. Cut/copy paste never worked properly?!? It –always- took two pastes for anything to actually paste. Often using drag to move or copy something crashed explorer quite often. Start up and shut down was getting pretty slow. On the flip side, when all was running it was fine for developing in VS and SQL, and, general performance for building and running apps was good.

I used to have an ASUS and was always happy with it except for its weight and battery life. To be fair this was mainly because it was a desktop replacement. I did pick up the ASUS laptop for a very good price when I did get it but the brand does not appear to be as popular here in Australia.

Dell just bothers me that it is all online. I know I am in the IT space and even spent many years in the e-commerce space, but I want to touch it, look at it and evaluate it.

Which leads me to Apple. The big reason with considering the apple is the feedback I have had. A number of people (that I work with and just read their blogs) have made the shift. Assuming you are and MSDN subscriber, you basically get two platforms for free. You get the confidence of high quality hardware. You also get all those treats that just come with OSX (Gargeband!). The real choice I was left with was which mac to get; MacBook or MacBook Pro? In the end I decided I wanted the slightly higher spec hardware from the MacBook Pro but found it very difficult to justify the large jumps in price for the extras on the higher spec’ed machines ($700 to get0.1 Ghz cpu increase and 215Mb more VRam). I ended up getting the Basic MacBookPro with an upgrade to 4GB of ram. Initial tests on Vista Ultimate running on Bootcamp have a performance index of 5.0 which thumps my old Sony score of 3.4.