This June marks the beginning of the 3rd year I have owned my Dell Inspiron 300m notebook PC. Since then it has been discontinued by Dell and taken some healthy abuse from me in the form of daily treks to class, journeys about the nether regions of campus and those few times I threw my backpack across the room, forgetting there was a laptop inside. It has served me well. It kept me sane in the most boring of classes and allowed me to catch up on some news or do a quick blog post while devouring a meatball sub or chocolate-chip bagel with egg and cheese during lunch in the Student Center Commons.
However, it has failed me in several ways. First off, I had purchased it before I was a real Mac nut. Secondly, it is pretty hard to get anything done on the 12 inch screen with a 1024x768 resolution. Blogging was near impossible as the WordPress post preview window would not be able to completely show my site without some perseveringly mundane scrolling. The original battery also fooled me into thinking it was charged and would randomly fall to 3% battery remaining, forcing me to lug around the extended battery. These hardships have made the Apple MacBook exceedingly desirable. A capable machine that I can gleefully tote to school everyday and have enough juice left to do some casual web surfing on the couch before plugging in and getting any real work done.
Understandably, the prospect of being able to use a trusted FTP client for things like minor site tweaks and not having tragedies occur is also welcomed. There are a few things holding me back though. The most important of which being "Which color?!??!." I have visited my local Apple store twice in the last week trying to decide which color I like best. I like the glossy non-matte finish of the white MacBook, but I adore the black MacBook. I have no problem with the lower system specifications of the white version but I don't exactly like the price premium that comes with the black version. After hours of thought and flickr scouring, I think I like the white one mainly because of the glossy exterior finish.
My other dilemma is cost. I might be able to foot some of the bill by selling off my aforementioned Dell notebook and a Palm LifeDrive I barely used. I also feel a little guilty as my current Mac Mini is only a few months old. However, I put great value in a mobile machine and might attempt to auction off my mini to the highest bidder in my family. After I had "switched" a year ago, I had always kept around a PC and a Mac - one for programming as required by various computer science courses utilizing Windows-only IDE's and the other for everything else. With the creation of Boot Camp, my need for two computers is extinguished and I should, theoretically, be able to subsist on only one computer instead of two or three. This leads to the need for a mini-DVI to DVI adapter to connect to the ACD when back in my room.
The MacBook's hard drive would only have to be so large as to run two or three operating systems, with most other media files inhabiting my external hard drive. Also, having only a primary computer would help consolidate my music collection rather than have it spread across multiple machines. Having all my music on a notebook would be great for those allnighters in the library when most people that share iTunes playlists have left or they and their machines have fallen asleep.
I could always wait until that lovely financial aid check is sent my way sometime in August, but I might have a use for a MacBook this summer. We shall see which way the wind blows. If you have noticed some changes around here recently it was just me optimizing things. I have a compelling desire to make this site extremely fast and as of now my 42kB site is hammered out in 0.42 seconds on a lowly 1.44 megabit connection. I have restyled the comments with CSS only instead of using an image and have tweaked and resaved every image to save a few bytes. For the time being I have taken out the Yahoo ads as their server seemed to be a little unresponsive today, causing my site to be unresponsive as well. Just a friendly reminder that you can purchase sponsored links at any time. Thanks to everyone that already has.