Well, I’ve spent the larger part of my free time this week playing with my new iBook! Ever since Apple came out with OS X (finally delivering the elusive “Unix for the desktop” that Linux never seemed to achieve), I’d said that I would get one if only the hardware price were reasonable when compared to a PC.

Well, I made good on my promise. I was looking for a laptop that was small and light enough to conveniently carry to work every day, and powerful enough to use as a development machine. The 12-inch iBook has all that, it runs Unix, has a wireless card built in (nothing to snap off), firewire, USB 2, CD burner/DVD player, and a battery that lasts over five hours! I’ve hardly seen a PC laptop match that, and certainly not at the same price.

There are a couple down sides, but they’re not too bad… it comes with 256MB RAM, which performs less than ideally with OS X. But after adding a 512MB chip (standard laptop DDR - very nice!) for a total of 3/4 gig, it hums like a bunny (do bunnies hum?). At 1.2GHz, it’s not the fastest CPU around, but I’ve hardly noticed as I’m not using it to play games, and spend a relatively small amount of time compiling large amounts of code.

Anyway, my impression after a week is VERY good. I’m getting to love the UI navigation tools — it’s much easier to keep a million windows open, even on this 1024×768 screen. I’m running Eclipse, Camino, Quicksilver, Apache, JEdit, Fink, and yes, even vi.

Yes, I still have my Windows desktop at home for games, etc, and the email/web server under the desk is running Linux. But man is it nice having all of the Unix tools in one spot, and having that spot be wherever I am, even on the BART on the way in to work. Count me as a convert!