I've been needing a new laptop capable of doing development on for a few months now. Typically I'm developing on my nice quad-core desktop, however now that my classes are over I've been traveling to San Fran on a regular basis. I have my severely under powered Gateway MX6421 laptop I picked up as a cheap refurb. 1.8Ghz *single* core just doesn't cut it now a days I'm afraid, the Core Duo is a must for developers on the road.
Mac Fag
If you've listened to "the podcasts":http://www.basementcoders.com/podcast you know I like to bug Mac Fan Boi #1 (marc) about his Mac. "Is that thing powered off your own sense of self esteem?" "How did you pay for that thing? With your penis and testicles? Cause surely you won't be needing those any more", and the list goes on.... Now, I need a dual core laptop for travel, so I don't have to wait 5 mins a build. No problem, just grab a $1000 dell and throw Ubuntu on it (Dell Canada doesn't sell them pre-configured with Ubuntu) you might say. Yeah, I could, but that kind of limits my selection, you see, cause it's been my experience that Ubuntu doesn't always work nicely on laptops. For instance, on my current laptop sometimes the thing will hibernate and every time it goes into "sleep" mode, I loose the ability to use my touch pad. I can't tolerate that kind of shit any more, I just need the laptop to work so I can develop on it. Enter the Mac.
My history with Macs
Almost every single person on my team owns a Mac, and swears by them. When you ask them "why do you love it so much", they'll respond "you just have to use one to find out, it's hard to explain otherwise". Now the last time I used a Mac was in University, we had to write our Pascal in the craptastic Mac II lab. One of the greatest days of my university career was when my prof agreed to let me submit a PC formatted disk containing my assignment written in Turbo Pascal. I could work from home! And I didn't have to use a Mac! yay! So needless to say, I wasn't a Mac fan. I was a gamer, for one, and I loved being able to swap out video cards, ram, cpus, I didn't like the fact that when you bought a Mac you were pretty much stuck with what you bought until the day you decided to fork over another $3K for a new one. You could upgrade slowly with a PC, perfect tool for a starving student.
They switched to Intel
It wasn't until Macs went Intel based that I thought about Mac, up until that point in time I saw them as tools only for beardos and people that hang in the local Starbucks. But even though they were intel based I compared hardware specs and thought to myself "I can build the same computer for a fraction of the price", however, i don't think the same holds true for the laptops. To me it seems like if you were to go get a Lenovo that was speced the same as a MacBook Pro, the price difference would be negligible.
Mac OSX
Mac OS X is linux like. That really appeals to me now that I code exclusively on Linux.
Rationalization
I started finding myself rationalizing an excuse to go get a Mac. "it just works", "Marc was a linux guy, now he owns (and loves) his Mac", "a lot of the elite coders in Java have them", etc... The latter rationalization is a bit like the crappy golf player that goes out and blows a tonne of cash on a set of clubs. Sure it might help marginally, hell it might even give him a shot of confidence, but at the end of the day it's not the car, it's the guy driving.
The nail in the coffin
So I'm here at my client's site, slogging away on my underpowered Gateway when it dawns on me "MacBooks are $1K (not the pro version), and they just work, no having to worry about whether a certain feature is going to work, no, it just works. So why don't I just catch the train to the Apple Store and get it over with?" The MacBook is more than adequate for what I need, that is, a laptop I'll use on the road. At home I can hop back on the quad-core Ubuntu desktop. I also like the fact the MacBook is small, perfect for the plane ride.
So the nail in the coffin was when my Tech lead caught wind of my interest in a MacBook. At first he was saying "no no no, Craig, buy the MacBook Pro. You are a professional developer, you need professional tools, if you buy bottom of the barrel, you'll get a bad taste in your mouth.". Ok, but I really don't have $2K+ to blow on something I only really need when I travel (perhaps once a month). Then it dawns on him: "Craig, I've been wanting to upgrade to a new MBP for a long time. Why don't you buy mine for $1K and I'll go buy the new one." It really didn't take me long to reply "why not? $1K is my price point, and I would be getting a 17 inch MBP!" The funny thing is I wasn't even considering buying a 17" beast I could replace my desktop with, but for $1K, what the hell.
How it went down (in flames)
My tech lead has a corporate discount at the Mac Store, so our plan was to go down there after work, I would use my credit card to put $1K down on his new MBP, and he would pay the rest. So after partaking in one too many free wines (the hotel has a thing every Weds, free wine and cheese) we took our alcohol fueled impulse buying attitude into a situation I can only describe as possibly one of the biggest cock-blocks I've experienced at a retail store.
So we walk into the Apple store and find a salesperson (or whatever they are called in an Apple Store) to help us. My co-worker lists off the specs for the MBP he wants. They pretty much got what he needs, except he was interested in getting the glossy screen instead of the matte, but he said it wasn't a deal breaker. He gives her the "I'll take it" and then gets into a weird argument with her over AppleCare. That was the first weird vibe that got thrown into the experience, also she fed us some bullshit about why he should take the matte screen instead of the glossy screen because "colour is represented better in the matte version", which, from my reading, is the exact opposite of the truth.
The second bad vibe came when I pulled out my credit card and my co-worker explains that I will be picking up $1K of the purchase price as I am buying his old MBP. Immediately we are confronted with the words "I'm sorry, I can't do that". She claims because we are using a corporate discount, she can't split the bill. My coworker immediately asks "you don't work on commission do you?" "I'm hourly sir", yeah, no shit lady.
The topper to our experience is when the "manager" comes out to read us the riot act. "Sir, the agreement we have with your company doesn't allow a third part to purchase, even if in part, products under your the corporate rate". We argued for a for a bit, but in the end they took the nicely boxed MBP off the counter and with a parting shot the sales person quipped "Now sir, you can go to the website and pick the model you really want and pay for it however you choose".
The bottom line is, my coworker is going to "use the website" and buy a new Mac. He then in turn will sell me his old one. But I have to wonder what the hell I'm getting into here, I'm getting into bed with a company that doesn't really care if they have my business. I mean, that store could have been $3,500 richer yesterday. But maybe it all goes into the central coffers anyway, so they truly don't give a shit how you get your Mac, because they know you want one 