New Mac enroute!

Well, after the joy of the iBook G3, and then the free G4 upgrade Apple provided me thanks to some bad luck on motherboard and display failures, I’m biting the bullet and pulling the upgrade lever. And it has now shipped. 🙂

Left Shanghai according to FedEx this morning. Why a Mac? Well, many reasons now. I love the OS and ability to get things done a lot easier than a Windows system, I already got the copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac so I can run Windows at near-native speeds, a Mac laptop sleeps correctly and wakes up quickly just by opening and closing the screen, whereas the HP I have occasionally will take upwards of 10 minutes to wake up if it’s been sleeping over a day, and finally, and here’s the kicker… it’s cheaper. I was buying a Mac anyway, and went through a developer program hardware discount I had an all that, but removing that and going pure list price:

The stock Apple 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo 17″ laptop comes in at $3,099 Canadian. When I took a Dell M1710 system and outfitted it as near as I could get, including drives, free DVD burner upgrade, and RAM, the price shows up at $3,567 Canadian. Neither of these are budget systems, they are the top of the line or near the top of the line in both cases. HP doesn’t seem to have anything comparable even as a base model in the Canadian store I can find, nor does Lenovo (both still on last gen Core Duo or Centrino and older AMD processors).

And just thinking about, you don’t get a built-in camera and optical in/out on the audio on the Dell either. Or Firewire 800. You do get the built-in modem and a built-in VGA out rather than using a DVI to VGA adapter for presentations and the like. Ah well. Now I’m just a bit happier (if that’s possible) about this purchase. To say nothing of the fact I got it cheaper than list with the Select Developer Discount program from Apple. 😉

Currently playing in iTunes: Peace by Norah Jones