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25 novembre Developer Day (DDD6)So today was Developer Developer Developer Day, or DDD6. I attended a couple of rather nifty sessions on WPF by Oliver Sturm, watched an informative session about design patterns by Gary Short, saw Chris Hay build a Silverlight Application with as few slides as possible and saw some good lunchtime grok talks. But the highlight of the day for me was finally managing to grab hold of a Channel 9 Mascot at the end of Richard Costall and Dave McMahon's (NextGenUG) Swaggily Fortunes (actually Swaggily Swag and A Question of Swag) who shall now take pride of place in my ever growing pile of swag.
The unfortunate timing of Swaggily Fortunes meant I was forced to miss out on Ben Hall's session on testing applications with MbUnit Gallio, but I was glad to hear that his session went well and that he still managed to draw a crowd away from "the session with the free stuff". Of course the day ended with a Geek Dinner organised by Zi Makki; Pizza Express for 40 people is quite a feat to organise, but he keeps on doing it. Somebody should give that man MVP status.
The grok talks went well - I particularly liked Guy Smith-Ferrier's 20 slides of 20 seconds - it's entertaining watching someone try and time everything right, especially when he knows he has a gap to fill in ;-)
In other news, my MacBook arrived 3 days ago. I will write a post about my experiences with it some point next week. Right now, I feel like I'd be a bit negative about it... 10 novembre I did it.So, I've ordered my MacBook. For those interested in these kinds of things, the specs are...
Throw in an mini-DVI to DVI adapter and a 3 year warranty and it totals £739.08. It's worth mentioning that on the normal apple store, the warranty is another £150 and you wouldn't get the £75.83 discount I got for the machine. That means that on the normal store the thing costs over £1000. And at that point there are some much better PC laptops to buy. It's unfortunate I can't get a discount on them really... In the end, noone managed to bring up a compelling argument for why I shouldn't get a Mac, or find a better PC laptop for the same money/screen. I've never really played with a Mac in the same wasy I have with Windows and Linux (ie, attempted to use one for a decent length of time) and another small reason for getting this is that I am very curious as to how good/bad OSX really is in everyday life. I suspect it won't really make a difference, but only time will tell. Just have to wait another 17 days for it to arrive... November 27th, here we come! 06 novembre Should I buy a MacBook?I've been having a personal crisis. I've been having these urges to buy a MacBook.
Now, before people go and criticise me, I know I'm supposed to be a Microsoft Fanboy. And I'd still like to be, but I need a new laptop and Apple do actually seem to be offering a better deal at the moment. Well, for the low-end MacBook anyway, the MacBook pro is beaten out by the Dell XPS with not only a better graphics card (NVidia 8700M instead of the 8600M) but two of them instead of one (allowing it a much better resolution on the same physical size monitor). But they're both £1799 I don't have, so I'll stick with the low-end stuff thankyou very much...
So yeah, the MacBook. Starts at £699, which is a bit more than I was looking to spend (ideally I was going to spend no more than £600). But that gets a Dual Core Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2GHz. Compare to my (pretty damn new and fast) PC which is a Dual Core Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.66GHz. Pretty good. It has 1GB of RAM, which ok, really needs to be at least 2GB. It has an 80GB hard drive, which everyone has said is small and I've had to explain that it's all I need - it's my laptop, not my PC. It's a 13.3 inch screen, which is exactly the size I'm looking for (well, I would have settled for a 12 inch). And with OSX Leopard installed, that means it has Bootcamp, which in turn means I can (if I want/choose to) install Windows Vista on it (since I have a spare copy anyway).
And there's another point... I don't want to install Windows on it. It's a Mac, so I'd use Mac OSX. It does everything I want from the laptop, including browsing the web with Safari, playing music with iTunes (although I do admit I don't like iTunes for media playing), and remote desktoping to the PC. The only stuff I'd want on it that I'd need Windows for are Office 2007 (cause I don't want to pay out again for Office for the Mac 2008) and Visual Studio. That's the only time I'd need Windows, and that's the only reason Windows would touch the machine - whether it be Parallels or Bootcamp that it's used through (my preference is for Parallels, but that's not free).
Now, I did just hear someone say "but you coud do that on a cheaper PC laptop". And you're probably right, I could. And my argument for getting a more powerful PC laptop would be that I'd like it to last a bit longer than my current laptop did (I've been complaining about my current laptop for a while - it's slow and has been ever since they put a Celeron processor in it at the manufacturing plant). I'm unsure if this argument holds up with Mac OSX because of how often a new version of Mac OSX comes out. In a year's time when they release Mac OSX 10.6, I'm going to feel obliged to upgrade (I am... I've been using Vista since Beta cause of the same reason). And that's another £89 or so, but the hardware should still be able to run OSX right up till 10.8 (roughly the same time everyone's complaining Windows Seven doesn't work perfectly on 4 year old PCs).
To add to all of this, the MacBooks were updated on Novemeber 1st. So they're unlikely to be updated again till April/May of next year (every 6 months or so). It's not going out of date any time soon ("soon" has a different meaning in the world of Tech and Apple). To stop myself from spending an innordinate amount of money earlier (£739, MacBook, 2GB of memory, a DVI adapter and a 3 year warranty, with discount from the Educational store cause I'm an academic) I've actually moved some money between my accounts so that I can't access enough from my card to order it. But that tactic won't last forever, and I've been seriously considering the MacBook for about 2 weeks now.
So what do I do? Do I get it over with and order a MacBook? Or do nothing because I can't see a PC laptop that suits my needs in quite the same way for less than £900? Leave a comment. |
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