RSS Feed
Twitter
March 21st, 2006 
QuadsZilla As of yesterday morning, my hard disk is fried on my laptop. The Battery hasnt worked for the last 3 months and the DVD player craps out when watching movies.
I´m thinking of getting the Apple Macbook Pro with it’s dual Intel core sexyness, but I’ve never worked on an Apple before. It´s suppose to be 4 times faster than the powerbook and looks like one of the best laptops on the market. It even runs non native software, although a bit slower.
The problem I have is that it seems that Apple users make prettier Web pages and, as you probably know, it´s crappy, spammy looking pages that have the highest click through rates. Not that I expect any responses, but what are your thoughts? Should I make the jump to “Think Different”? or are Apple users nothing but sandal wearing freaks and hippies?
Posted in 
Give it a try
I just made the switch myself, and I am definetly not wearing sandal’s! I really like the idea of moving away from the tired old PC platform and onto something new. My Macbook pro arrived today, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
As a programmer, I can tell you it’s a mixed bag.
Apples have a nice OS, and it’s unix based, but certain things just don’t run as well, or don’t exist.
I use a program called Regex coach extensively. It doesn’t exist.
Zend Studio doesn’t run nearly as well on OSX as it does on Windows.
… list is much longer than this.
… but, Adium rocks, and OSX is much nicer than windows.
But don’t expect a complete PC replacement. Only Mac fanatics insist windows is dead, and that even power users don’t need Windows sometimes. Windows is standard. It won’t be going away for awhile.
I switched to apple in january and very happy with my powerbook g4
Its also very friendly to blackhat tools (unix inside)..
Come on over!! You can still make spammy websites if you want.
There is even a workaround for getting Windows XP to book on the Intel based Macs for those days when you need to design extra spammy sites.
It will change your life, especially if you do any LAMP coding which comes standard. Switching was the best descision I ever made.
Plus, it looks like you can run XP now on it anyways so you have no reason not to (see digg).
>>4 times faster than the powerbook
that is misleading. i wouldn’t expect those types of performace boosts in everyday use. see the macworld review http://www.macworld.com/2005/11/reviews/quadreview/index.php
however, the OS is considerably more stable than windows, and macs just provide a better user experience. i made the switch last september, and i doubt that i would never go back to a PC.
nah why waste ur time switching to mac.
I made the switch to MacBook Pro last month and I’m loving it. I’m no hippie either and it took me about a week but I now have all Java and PHP running smoothly on it. Integration with Windows still is a pain in the arse despite what Apple says but a third party tool nixed all my frustration.
Only annoyances:
Lack of a good ssh client (seriously missing SecureCRT)
Lack of a good FTP client (seriously missing my FileZilla)
Some folders are hidden in Finder (such as /usr)
No video conference in MSN messenger
Pics of her first day home:
http://www.tonyspencer.com/mt/archives/2006/03/boy_meets_macbo.htm
What greg says about performance is true. Its very fast but not that fast. Firefox has a universal binary but the bastard still takes 6 seconds to load. Once its loaded it renders pages faster than my PC.
Would love to hear what PHP IDE other users are using.
IntelliJ IDEA worked perfectly first try out of the box for Java. Even my project files saved on PC openned.
Microsoft remote desktop works beautifully.
Cisco finally started producing a VPN client for mac. Works perfect.
I do love filezilla. Any thoughts on what FTP program I should use if I get this?
I’m using something called CyberDuck. It sucks. I’d pay good money for a nice app.
OMG … stablity … give me a break. that is such a tired, lame argument. we are so far from the blue screen days. pc isn’t going anywhere and it’s not going to solve your life’s problems anytime soon.
that’s exactly what i want … to relearn new tools … find apps that don’t exist … buy new software … oh yeah … sounds like a grand old time.
if you want a shiny box buy an alienware and dust everything.
Get it – it rocks!!!
It’s double speed to my PBG4 1.67 GHz (2 GB) in Rosetta (non Universal Binary mode – e.g. Adobe Creative Suite CS) and nearly 4 times faster with optimized progs!
Get it – it rocks!!!
Transmit for FTP. It’s great. I use CyberDuck too but Transmit is much more powerful. Get it from panic.com
i am using cyberduck as well. i wouldn’t say i hate it – for a free app it functions well enough. however, if i were somebody that had to ftp stuff often, i would definitely not be too impressed.
thanks thomas for the tip on Transmit.
I didn’t become sandal wearing hippy until I switch over to Windows.
I just got my MBP last week. it’s fast as hell and great for just about everything. and with everyone hacking xp to run on it, soon you’ll be able to have your cake and eat it too.
for ftp, transmit is good, so is rbrowser and so is fugu. for ssh, ya know you can do it from the terminal, right?
anyway, it’s as possible to make crappy looking, seo-riffic sites on a mac as it is to make luscious, gorgeous oeuvres. its the carpenter, not the tools…. although as tools go, the MBP is damned nice.
Call me lazy or perhaps efficient with my time but I really don’t want to type in an IP address for any one of the tens of machines I ssh to on a daily basis.
Sittin’ on the dark site snackin’ on a Mac. Nothing better my friend.
If I could afford it, I’d buy a mac laptop too
i just bought a mbp the other day even though i hate the name i love it… its so so so F***in fast ! i jus cant belive it i have played around on other apple laptops and thought the was fast but this is something else i jus cant wait till i can find a good msn messanger with video confrencing on it, for me that is a bit of a downer but every thing else is brilliant ! even the programs running on rosetta are fast if you compare them to windows.. but then again i cant wait to get windows running on this untill they release a msn with video conferecing, which i realise will be TIME! but my advice to anybody wondering weather to buy one or not is … SAVE UP AND BUY ONE RITE NOW ! NO ! INFACT GET A LOAN AND BUY 1 !!!!!
Apple now officially allows Intel Macs to run XP. http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/