One of the reasons I can’t wait for university is the promise of a new computer. For the longest time, one of my favourite things to do was to scope out the possible candidates to become my new prized possession.

When I first began the search, I was adamant that it was to be a desktop. Several years ago, I still considered laptops to be heavily overpriced and very underpowered. I kept on looking to Ars Technica’s awesome system guides and I picked out my components, ready for my new dream machine.

Then times changed, and as I got closer and closer to graduating and learned more and more about my needs at university, I realized that a desktop was going to restrict my movement a lot. The big thing though, was that laptops were now in my price range and weren’t slower than my current machine. I began looking at Acers, Dells, Toshibas, and the rest and thought that I had found a good laptop and waited.

And then a funny thing happened this year. After using Linux for almost two years now, I was seeing its limitations. It was hard enough to get all of my hardware to work on a desktop, but on a laptop, the odds seemed stacked against me. I definitely had enough of Windows.

I noticed that most of the blogs I follow are written by Mac users. And increasingly, the elite among the computer world agreed — the Mac was good. OS X was beautiful and was a dream to work with and the hardware was also beautiful and functional.

Even when the Macbook wasn’t even rumoured about, just after Apple bumped the specs on the iBook, I was already sold. Yes, if everything happened a year earlier, I would be getting an iBook G4.

So why? Why, after two years of running Linux, would I go to Apple?

The big reason is OS X. OS X is everything I could want in an OS. It has a beautiful design and lots of eye candy. It’s rock solid, since it’s built on top of UNIX. Having the terminal as an option will be nice since I’ve been doing the Linux way of things for the past while. Basically, UNIX + good design = win.

And now, with the release of the Macbook, the low-end Apple laptop is powerful now. It starts at 1.83 GHz, which is what the Macbook Pro started out at when it first came out. And the good thing is that the price didn’t rise in Canada. With student discounts, the 12″ iBook G4 was $1200 and that’s the same as the low-end Macbook.

The difference is that the Macbook is much, much faster. From what I’ve read, even with integrated graphics, the system is speedy, which is a feat, considering OS X is the most graphics-intensive OS there is.

Yes, the integrated graphics is a concern, but at the price point, there is no laptop with a dedicated GPU. Besides, dedicated graphics is only necessary for really super gamers. I’m a gamer, but I’m not one to dump loads of money for a super computer to run games at two billion frames per second. Neither will I go and get a Windows laptop just so I can play games. That’s evident in the fact that I’ve used Linux for the past two years. Linux is not a gamer’s paradise, but I manage to get games played. I expect to do the same on the Mac.

Unless there is a laptop out there that is super cheap and super powerful and Windows stops sucking, I’m going Macbook. Again, the real deal-winner here is OS X. All of the other stuff, like being the fastest notebook at that price point and the magnetic stuff is all bonus. I’d much rather get a more expensive computer that I’m happy with than a cheaper one that might be marginally more powerful, but needs constant fixing.

Tags: Apple, Computers

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 10:19 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.