One Week with MacBook Pro
May be, just may be, the likes of Microsoft, Dell, HP and Gateway have given up competing with Apple. May be Apple has the set the standard so high that others are just ignoring whatever comes out of Apple - both at hardware and software levels. Apple is not perfect, and the MacBook Pro has room for improvement, but when compared to plastic-feeling Dell laptops and the weekly-patched M$ Windoz - well - the comparision is just meaningless and futile. My old Dell notebook could be compared to, may be, a HP notebook, but not to the MacBook Pro. The MPB is worlds apart from those. That’s what I feel after using the MBP for a week.
I can see that a lot of effort went into idiot-proofing the hardware and software, and a lot of attention has been paid into the finer details. Microsoft and several other companies brag about how well their products are tightly integrated to work together nicely. Apple does set a standard for integration. Mac OS and the hardware are so well integrated that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.
“If you can’t beat it, just ignore it“ seems to be the mantra at Microsoft, Dell, HP etc. There are occasional exceptions, of course, like the ones mentioned in this funny video from NYTimes.
I wonder how MBP would be as a developer box.
IDEs such as IntelliJ or Eclipse etc, mks toolkit kind of software etc…
Share your experiences on that ? I am thinking of the switch as well…
I dont want to get into the argument of MAC vs PC. I want one system for personal use and possibly use it as a developer box as well.
I use the MPB primarily for development at my job, as well as other tasks like writing, blogging and so on. I use IntelliJ as the IDE, and I have no issues with it. The J2SE distribution is a bit different from Sun’s, and can easily be fixed by creating some symbolic links. I switched from Linux (Fedora) to Mac OS X, and I’m happy about the switch. The MBP feels much more productive, I’m not going back.