A tale of two laptops

Lately Kevin has had that familiar itch, the itch to buy a new laptop. He's been commuting between Bakersfield and the Bay Area, and he wants to start working on some projects, so he needs a personal machine that he can use no matter where he is.

I of course tried to talk him into buying a MacBook - because it can run any OS, and it certainly packs enough punch for him to revolutionize the world. And his girlfriend has been strongly hinting that he should get a Mac, so that she could use it. And I told him about the magic "October 14th" date, when Apple was supposedly going to release updated notebooks. But after a lot of whining about how the MacBook doesn't have a trackpoint, and how he didn't like the keyboard, and how the MacBook wasn't a Thinkpad. And so, he bought a Thinkpad:

Kevin's X200, beside my work-supplied MacBook Air

I'll admit, the Thinkpad X200 does look like it is a nice machine. It is thicker than the air, but it has a smaller desk footprint, which is nice if you are on a cramped plane or train. But it had two problems - the screen, while smaller, wasn't very high resolution. This is apparently fixed in the X200s - but nobody knows why Kevin didn't purchase that instead.

The other major problem that Kevin had with the X200 was that it came with Windows Vista. Microsoft has launched a major ad campaign, saying to the effect that "Vista is really works okay now, and in reality, you actually love it". But as it turns out, there actually is something to all of the negativity around Vista. Some of the problems that Kevin had with Vista include it not giving him full permissions over his external USB drive that was formatted NTFS on a different machine. Even more damning, when we tried to play Urban Terror, he first encountered an error where Vista said that there was a fault in the graphics driver, and that it had to be reloaded. Then something went haywire, and his wireless stopped working. Mike and I continued to play the game, and Kevin wasn't ever able to re-join.

I tried to talk Kevin into seeing if he could downgrade to Windows XP, which is something that Lenovo apparently supports if you buy Windows Vista Business. But Kevin was so fed up with the machine by that point, that he actually called up Lenovo and got an RMA number so that he could return it.

Being bereft, and laptop-less, Kevin looked at what Apple announced on Tuesday. And while he initially wasn't on board, by the time he returned home yesterday, he was carrying this:

Kevin's new aluminum MacBook, unboxed.

After taking a series of unboxing photos, we kicked the tires on his new MacBook with a round of Urban Terror, and it held up just fine. The new Nvidia 9400M graphics/chipset looks like the real deal - the performance of Urban Terror seemed great, and it didn't seem to be taxing the MacBook that greatly (it wasn't getting too warm). I'm going to have to spend a little bit more time with Apple's newest machines before I write up my impressions, but for now, I'm glad that Kevin has a Mac.

Now to get him writing an iPhone application....

-Andy.