Mac?
The oddest thing happened today… I have had this $2k allotment for a work laptop burning a hole in my pocket for a few weeks, I was waiting for vista to come out. I wondered into micro center after having a frustrating time trying to find a vista laptop that didn’t have sucky shared memory (I did find a couple good candidates)… but well I wondered into micro center and they had the older 17″ mac power books on clearance for 1799. I gave it some thought and decided I could dual boot vista or XP on it easily enough (Intel is such a arms broker, I love it)… so what the hell I bought a Mac. Brushing up on my mac skills will help me support the mixed environment at work and all that… I probable would NOT have spent my own money on one, I still really don’t think you get enough bang for your buck hardware wise, OS X is nice though.
The Toshiba I was considering for about the same amount had twice the hard drive twice the memory, core 2 duo processor, twice the vid card memory and a much faster one… etc. BUT all that being said I must say it has been a very smooth experience so far, just doing work and web stuff. The Mac does just seem to work pretty well, OS X is nice, as sexy or more then vista in some ways and in some other ways not as nice. Certainly a few annoying differences but nothing that is to big a deal IMO.
What has been burning me up in the back of my mind though is vista runs games like shit. Every single real game (solitaire need not apply, thanks) runs at about half the frame rate on vista on my game system. It might just be the big fat-ass (dare I say mac like 
memory foot print) or it could be that it doesnt like my on board raid controller or who knows (lots of driver drama). Macs tend to run games pretty badly too, but I hate having to dual boot on my game box to XP just play decently. The whole games on vista thing has made me slightly bitter about spending more time with the OS and I think helped motivate me to dig into something new-ish.
I’m sure I’ll end up with a Vista MCE media center soon enough though to meet some of my other AV needs (almost invertible at this point).
I’m hardly a convert, but I get it a bit and can see how folks can get there. What a odd day it’s been.