On 4-Oct-05, at 12:19 PM, Squeak Smalltalk wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I will change job soon and I have to decide which type of laptop I  
> want.
> I have always had pc-laptops.
> But I see that a lot of squeak programers use powerbooks.
>
> If you use a powerbook give me some advice ?
I've had a high end winXP laptop - lovely hardware, superb screen,  
nice keyboard - and hated it. battery life of 45 minutes is not my  
idea of fun. winXP is, if anything, worse than the windows 3.0 I had  
to debug VisualWorks 1.0 on in 1991.

I've had an older G3 powerbook - the funky black ones -and it was ok.  
decent battery life, good all round hardware quality but OS 9.x stunk.

I now have a pBook G4 15" and it's rather nice. Good performance,  
tolerable UI (not good, but tolerable), decent battery life and OSX  
tiger is quite good. Spotlight in particular seems to be the  
beginning of a real change for the better in the UI experience. Right  
now I'm using it attached to a big screen/external kdb etc as my main  
machine. Yes, you heard it here first, tim is no longer living on a  
RISC OS machine.

I submit that they are well worth the apparent price premium, though  
I don't think it is much of a premium over any decent quality winXP  
laptop. If you compare with the el-cheapo's then ... well never mind.


tim
-- 
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim