I've used a laptop as my main machine for some years now - probably around 7. As such, the machine gets a lot of abuse, and needs a fair bit of grunt behind it to cover everything that I'll possibly throw at it. This ranges from: o Database development (MySQL, MS SQL and Access) o Web development (primarily in PHP, but written by hand in a text editor) o Application development (usually in VB) o Graphics editing (Photoshop usually) o Recently, video editing (Premiere) o Massive amounts of e-mail (Thunderbird, which usually takes about 600mb of RAM)

My previous laptop - a Toshiba 1130 had been bought 4 years ago. It's done an *amazing* job and I'd have no problems recommending a Toshiba to anyone who needed a laptop. So why have I changed to a Mac now?

Toshiba weren't able to offer me a machine which fitted my needs exactly. The previous laptop was pretty basic in what peripherals it had. The physical an technical needs of the machine are: o It's got to be small(ish) and light. o Needs to have onboard wireless networking. This is a *must*. o Ideally have onboard Bluetooth. o Decent amount of RAM. My previous machine had a gig. Anything less than this isn't any good to me. o Firewire. I'm going to be doing a considerable amount of stuff over the next year with video editing. o With the above, it's going to need a big-ish hard disk on it and a DVD burner. o It needs to look relatively pretty. This doesn't bother me personally, but being married to (and living with) a non-geek, it needs to be relatively unobtrusive.

Toshiba (and some other contenders) were able to offer something which ticked some of the boxes, but not all of them.

It was an odd choice that I started investigating the Mac. I know Joel relatively well and have a deep respect for his technical ability and consider myself to work in a similar way. He's recently converted to a Macbook Pro (from here known as an MBP) and is working extremely well in it. One of the things that I need to be able to do is take to a new machine easily and not have to go through a significant learning curve. This was one of the things that's always steered me away from OSX (Mac's own operating system). With the recent developments within the Apple field of things like Bootcamp and Parallels, which allow you to run Windows (and other operating systems) natively on the newer Intel based Mac hardware, this was becoming a non-issue rapidly.

Sioned and myself headed over to Manchester a couple of weeks ago to the Apple store there to compare the different models. Did I want a Macbook or an MBP? Glossy screen or matte? After making the choice, I put a call in to the Apple sales people and ordered a 15" MBP with glossy screen. It arrived yesterday, taking a total of 11 days from ordering to delivery. Why didn't I order over the counter in the shop? Because I work for a University I get a significant discount which isn't available over the counter.

I was concerned that the screen would have problems with glare, which was one of the reasons for checking it out in the shop. This isn't a concern for me, although if you have any possibility at all of using the screen in direct sunlight, go with the matte screen.

Out of the box, OSX is rather intuitive. It sets itself up quickly and easily. I'm rather impressed. Some of the foibles of it are taking some getting used to, but I suspect that's partly coming from a ridiculous number of years using nothing but Windows. I remember changing from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 and wondering where Program Manager had gone. This feels pretty similar.

I downloaded the Boot Camp Beta and set about installing that, but found that A) You can't install from a USB memory key B) If you burn a CD, it needs to be bootable. This caused a few coasters, but I was well on my way after a bit of googling.

From here, I set Parallels up so that it would use the existing bootcamp setup, so essentially I can run XP natively and also within OSX. This seems a pretty decent setup. Whilst Parallels is absolutely fantastic, it's still suffering some issues in that giving it a really intensive workout can cause it to slow down. Because resources are shared between OSX and XP in this way, the whole machine isn't available to either OS. As such, when I'm running resource hungry applications, this does become apparent.

Safari seems a bit unstable, having crashed on me four times so far - quite often whilst looking at results on Google, which is a little disturbing. I've given up on that for now since I prefer the UI of Firefox anyway.

Overall, I'm rather pleased. There's lots of nice little things that've been well thought out, ranging from the charger having the inability to tear itself, instead being held in place by a magnet. The keyboard which lights up and the screen which dims when in a dark room... you can tell it's a good amount of design time has gone into it.

I'm looking forward to using this machine for the next few years.