For what it's worth I'd like to share some observations on what it's been like to switch from a Lenovo T400 (a work horse 'business' machine) to a 15" MBP for work (development) and personal use.
Mac Wins:
- The physical build of the machine is remarkable, the keyboard/screen etc just seem like they're from a completely different specification of machine.
- 'Sleeping' the machine is very smooth, the T400 would always take some time to go into sleep and coming out would be unusable for a good 15 seconds. The Mac drops in/out of sleep mode in 2-3 seconds each time
- The sound the lid makes when it closes, it's like closing a drawer on a high quality piece of furniture where the T400 was a clicky/crunchy snappy sound of cheap plastic
- Itunes is now usable, on Windows it is a dreadful pig of an application even on a dual core machine with 4GB of RAM.
- Battery life while not in netbook levels is excellent and the magnetic power connector is one of the most simply pleasing pieces of industrial design I've seen in a while & I'm quite clumsy so it'll probably save the machine at some point.
- It's faster. My apps build about 30-40% quicker in IDE or in ANT.
- Having a proper terminal and BSD tools rules and actually fits very nicely in the whole OS paradigm. I thought it might be jarring to jump from a *nix terminal to the Mac Finder but it is not.
- Audio quality whilst still being a laptop is leagues up on the Lenovo.
PC Wins:
- The Mac is far heavier in my bag, though should've predicated that given the materials of the two machines
- TortoiseSVN is a killer SVN application, the Mac ones i've used so far are pretty clunky by comparison.
- Exchange integration sucks with Mail and Entourage, MS Outlook is an excellent application.
- Macbook doesn't seem to want to use my phone as a modem over HSDPA
- I can work faster in a code editor on my PC but maybe that'll change. I miss the HOME/END buttons that jump to the start/end of the line but I suppose I can map some key combos to do that.
- I don't quite get the Finder yet, I'm more efficient moving around the PC filesystem and the moment.
- I need a decent project-oriented IDE, not necessarily to integrate to build but to browse large projects. XCode doesn't seem to be up to it as it's crashing when I add the files to the project.
So recommendations for code editors, SVN clients & Exchange integration solutions would be welcome.
Mac Wins:
- The physical build of the machine is remarkable, the keyboard/screen etc just seem like they're from a completely different specification of machine.
- 'Sleeping' the machine is very smooth, the T400 would always take some time to go into sleep and coming out would be unusable for a good 15 seconds. The Mac drops in/out of sleep mode in 2-3 seconds each time
- The sound the lid makes when it closes, it's like closing a drawer on a high quality piece of furniture where the T400 was a clicky/crunchy snappy sound of cheap plastic
- Itunes is now usable, on Windows it is a dreadful pig of an application even on a dual core machine with 4GB of RAM.
- Battery life while not in netbook levels is excellent and the magnetic power connector is one of the most simply pleasing pieces of industrial design I've seen in a while & I'm quite clumsy so it'll probably save the machine at some point.
- It's faster. My apps build about 30-40% quicker in IDE or in ANT.
- Having a proper terminal and BSD tools rules and actually fits very nicely in the whole OS paradigm. I thought it might be jarring to jump from a *nix terminal to the Mac Finder but it is not.
- Audio quality whilst still being a laptop is leagues up on the Lenovo.
PC Wins:
- The Mac is far heavier in my bag, though should've predicated that given the materials of the two machines
- TortoiseSVN is a killer SVN application, the Mac ones i've used so far are pretty clunky by comparison.
- Exchange integration sucks with Mail and Entourage, MS Outlook is an excellent application.
- Macbook doesn't seem to want to use my phone as a modem over HSDPA
- I can work faster in a code editor on my PC but maybe that'll change. I miss the HOME/END buttons that jump to the start/end of the line but I suppose I can map some key combos to do that.
- I don't quite get the Finder yet, I'm more efficient moving around the PC filesystem and the moment.
- I need a decent project-oriented IDE, not necessarily to integrate to build but to browse large projects. XCode doesn't seem to be up to it as it's crashing when I add the files to the project.
So recommendations for code editors, SVN clients & Exchange integration solutions would be welcome.
