A Mac lover in a Windows developer

My wife Stephanie got her little 12” iBook this week. It's killing me because I like it so much better than my big clunky HP laptop.

That's pretty crazy when you consider that my HP has a 15” 1400x1050 screen, and even with a 2 GHz Celeron it still has a lot of horsepower to do many great things. The only thing it really lacks is good video hardware, as evidenced by trying to play Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 on it (many, many animated sprites all over the place).

Steph bought the iBook because she needed something small and functional to take with her to both the classes she teaches and to the classes she takes. She needs to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint, access the Internet (campus is covered in Wi-Fi) and for fun watch DVD's. Through the academic Apple store, she scored it for about $1,200 with upgrades in memory and the built-in AirPort card.

The more I touch and play with Apple stuff, the more I feel conflicted as a Windows developer. I mean, at the end of the day, I love .NET and all, but OS X is just so... pretty. It's hard to qualify what makes the UI so much better, but it simply is better. From what I've seen so far of Longhorn, we'll get our pretty UI, but it's still a year or two off.

Of course, if I ever quit being a programmer to instead be an independent starving film maker, I'll have to switch. It's the right thing to do!