Entering the Twilight Zone
I feel like I’ve sinned pretty hard. I know I’m posting this a week late, but as of 6/6/6, I was the ‘proud’ owner of a new Macbook Pro. My old laptop was quickly dying on me, and I really didn’t want to have to explain to my client why I wasn’t using my laptop anymore. Worse would have been if it started hissing and smoking in the middle of a meeting while I was taking notes. Having found out that there was an Apple store nearby, I stopped in just for a peek.
Two sales guys and three hours later, I walked out with a brand new 15″ 2.16Ghz core-duo MacBook Pro.
In a word, it’s awesome. I’ve got Bootcamp installed, and it runs Windows XP like a champ. Sure, there’s a few minor annoying things, like the lack of a delete key, and no built in right mouse button, but it could certainly be worse. After all, it could weigh the same as it’s PC counterparts.
The fact is, there’s a software workaround to remap some of your keys to get delete and right click capabilities. It’s also considerably faster and lighter than my old Dell laptop. I used to be the guy saying “Do you honestly think Windows users care about a magnet on the power cord to guide it into place and pull out easily? If you can’t figure out where to put the power cable, take your computer back to the store.”
I’m quite thankful my Macbook ships with this feature. Not even four hours into owning it, I went to move the laptop, accidentally stepped on the power cord as I turned around and it popped right out, just like it was designed to. On most PC laptops, that could have caused some serious damage. Not on the Macbook.
The potential for my business is phenomenal now. I have access to Mac, Windows, and with my VMWare Technology Network license, I have access to every other x86 platform under the sun. All versions of Windows, SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux, Solaris x86, etc. Core duo processors make running VMWare pretty snappy. Even better than my single cpu desktop with 2GB of RAM.
I’m sure I’ll post some more updates about running Windows XP on the Macbook Pro as time goes on. Now, if only Apple would work with VMWare to get OSX running as a VMWare image. Wouldn’t that be something?
