“Perfectly rational decision process, what surprises me is how civil the reactions are — Mac/PC tends to be a religious divide for a lot of people.”

Those are the people who need to step away from the computer and go outside every now and then. :)

Nice one James. As a recent convert to Macs myself I’ve got to say I’ve not regretted my purchase, although expensive for me, for one minute. It’s a complete replacement for my ancient windows comp. and if it wasn’t for my need for the TabletPC I would be hard pressed to go back to a Windows system. I dunno Mac OSX just seems to flow so much better and like a couple of posters have said – it just works :)

Perfectly rational decision process, what surprises me is how civil the reactions are — Mac/PC tends to be a religious divide for a lot of people.

Let us know how things work out; I know people who are thrilled with Parallels (haven’t tried it myself) and I’ve had mixed experiences with XP and bootcamp.

-avi

Welcome to the fun side of computing. :)

Well, I guess sooner or later we at GottaBeMobile.com are gonna all say we “GottaMac”, and I am gonna have to take a bite of the Apple (my lips tremble at the thought though). I have to admit to not having much experience in the last few years on Macs, but have been most hesitant to jump back into the “orchard”. There is only so much time in a day to learn and use a computer, and part of my hesitancy is that once I enter the orchard, my time gazing through the “Windows” will be challenged. What’s a geek to do?

The one consistent thing I keep hearing though, is the audio/video production issue. If you knew how much time we spend at GottaBeMobile getting videos produced, you would understand the lure. It is a great feature of our site, but takes so much time. If a MacBook would help that, then I am all for it.

Be interesting to see how well Mobile Tech Manor fares with video, etc. now. I assume the Mac has a lighting enhancement feature? Past history proves you may need that one James! :)

My problem is that I tend to carry both my Samsung Q1 and my MacBook Amateur (aka not Pro) back and forth from home to office because I enjoy using both! Maybe, I need that Modbook. Hmmm… :)

Congrats James on your new Macbook Pro. I got my Macbook Pro in November and use it as a desktop replacement; I use my Samsung Q1P daily for work but the Mac works great. I have been doing videos of movies, pictures on DVD’s and the whole works with no problems so far. Also if you have a WiFi “N” it’s much faster for over the air video and audio. You guys can also use iChat with the built in video camera and works great. I also recommend you get some external hard drives for your video. Am running Mac OS X, Windows XP Pro, Vista Business Edition, using bootcamp and Parallels works great and you’ll find out that your 160GB hard drive will be less then you expected.

Yeah baby!

The only issue here is that Apple may update the 17 at NAB.

I went through the same thing recently and replaced my Dell desktop with an HP dv9000t notebook. I currently dual booting with Vista and Ubuntu. It supports two 7200rpm sata drives and 2G ram.

Fully loaded with the Nvidia 512MB graphics card and an HD-DVD would set you about 3k. 400 less if you forgo the HD-DVD (which I regret that I spent money on that)

Ah James, seems the Apple pixie dust fairy has been pretty busy at JKonTheRun! I agree with some of the other posters who talked about value. I have always agreed with you though, the “P” in “PC” for personal computers is just that – personal.

Nothing against Apple, having used them extensively at work for the last four years (and our IT folks did a pretty good job of keeping us up to date with each new hardware/software, release/update).

It didn’t make me a convert, much to the chagrin of some of my co-workers. (Macs still crash, still have hardware /software conflicts, still break down just like any computer.)

And, as I watched new folks in the office run up their credit card debt at Apple.com with each Mac Book Pro purchase (some for nothing more extensive than checking e-mails and synching iPods), I smiled as I happily paid as much as HALF to a THIRD LESS for a similarly or (more often) better equipped desktop, laptop and finally a tablet.

Do I like the looks of Apple? Can’t deny it, they are absolutely lovely to look at. But I found I really liked the look of green staying in my wallet a whole lot more :D