EdgeCloud

It’s a bold statement, but given the experience I’ve had with my new MacBook in just the last 12h, I can assure you this is not anywhere near an over-exaggeration. With the MacBook, Apple has redefined the consumer laptop segment by engineering a masterpiece. But you knew that. If you own a Mac, you love the design, adore Mac OS X and talk about your machine like it’s part of the family.

So what makes this iteration of Apple’s consumer laptop (as well as every MacIntel to come out so far) so special? One word: Parallels. When I first saw this a couple of months ago on TUAW I was completely intrigued. As a Web Developer, I’m wedded to developing in Firefox (and happily so), but tweaking to IE which means that I have to have a windows machine to do so (yeah, or Linux/WINE). But it’s incredibly difficult to maintain such a set up and still maintain a high level of productivity. The dream setup would be to run Windows inside of Mac OS X - seamslessly and without rebooting (a la boot camp) - and it should be fast unlike VirtualPC. I was convinced though that even if Parallels could do this then certainly Apple wouldn’t make a consumer grade laptop that could handle this type of work. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Enter the Core-Duo MacBook, capable of 2GB of RAM: an incredibly powerful combination that is a web development workhorse at-the-ready.

In the first days after the MacBook started shipping there was even footage showcasing some possibilities with Virtue and Parallels (fast and “perty”). Now I can personally vouch for the MacBook - it is a more than capable machine that can run (multiple installs of) windows and allow you to do the IE6/IE7 testing that you need to do. That alone is worth the price of the machine. Add blazing fast performance (Firefox is no slouch as a Universal Binary), built-in iSight, FrontRow (and Remote - which is definitely icing on the cake) and you have a monster package.

If you are a developer, I would heartily recommend purchasing *any* of the Core Duo Intel-based Macs. Parallels is clearly a killer app for developers and makes your next Apple purchasing decision not just the most important one you’ll ever make - it’ll be the easiest one.

Amazon currently has MacBooks with $100 rebate or MacBook Pro’s with $150 rebate (no tax, fast shipping). Even though it says Pre-Order and they scare you with a July ship date, I got mine in less than a week. Also, check out AppleCare there as it’s $30 cheaper than buying it at the Apple Store. You can easily save some serious cash by going that route - a great deal for such a great machine.

I’ll post more on how my memory upgrades and Parallels + XP Pro install went a little later.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 2nd, 2006 at 1:41 am and is filed under geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.