Decisions decisions, zeroing in on a Mobile Solution

What I’m looking for

  • a mobile computer so I can engage in the ritual of hackathons
  • capable CPU
  • enough memory: 4GBytes+ is sufficient for my needs
  • TextMate, a nifty Mac OSX project editor that appears to nail every feature I want out of an IDE without any apparent bloat (backups of gedit, Netbeans, Aptana, visual studio express if needed)
  • long battery life
  • capable graphics processor, I’d like to be able to do wonderful things with 3D, animations/rendering, and games
  • Crisp resolution display. Ideally a bunch of Retina displays glued together, hmmm.
  • heavily supported package manager. homebrew works, apt-get isn’t terrible, there are a number of solid ones available. I’ve compiled from source enough for several lifetimes ;)

I realize any capable system can give me most of what I want, but I’d like this mobile computer to last a few years. Given those requirements I opted for a MacBook Pro 13″ last weekend, but returned it after hearing a new MacBook Air came out yesterday in order to narrow down the trade space. I saved myself the download time for XCode and WoW (what a data beast) by copying them to a 320 Gbyte passbook.

The 13″ model comes standard with a respectable battery life of 7 hours wifi but skipped the optical drive. This size MacBook Air can be configured with 256 GByte drive, a core 2 duo 2.13Ghz, and 4 GByte ram for $1799. That’s pretty steep for a light mobile system these days, and I’ve read some critical reviews of the product. Tech fans get bored so we’re easily entertained by BigCo (Apple, Google, etc) drama.

One interesting option I entertained briefly is to go with an iMac and a carrying pack. I won’t need the system on a plane or train so an iMac serves as a powerful semi-mobile option. The big deterrents are a total sacrifice of mobility (no battery) and the vulnerable glass display, aka *SHATTER* system. Nice screen real estate though – 21″ or 27″.

The alternative is to trick out a different laptop, install Ubuntu or another flavor of open base OS, and add VMWare or VirtualBox to run Mac OS or Windows applications. Selecting a brand is a matter of location for me. If something does go wrong I’d like to know I can drop off the system nearby for a speedy repair. That’s one random variable that Apple takes off the table by providing outstanding customer service, and is key to their success.

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  • http://in8sworld.net/ iN8sWoRLd

    Ive been in the same quandry several times over the years – looking for the perfect machine with which I will be spending the majority of my time. Each of the last three times I’ve settled on a Mac (iBook, then Powerbook, now MacBook) each time small (12″, 12″, 13.3″). Virtualbox runs killer fast on it, but there have been a lot of times that I have wished it was running Ubuntu instead.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Thanks for chiming in with your past experience with the mobile macs. It’s good to hear they’ve served you well.

  • http://in8sworld.net/ iN8sWoRLd

    Re-reading the above I guess I didn’t actually give you much qualitative info. I’ve been very happy with the quality of all of my Macs. While its considered “slick” by a lot of people, I’m personally not such a big fan of OS X – I’d much rather use Linux (and apt-get kicks ass by the way IMO) but when you’re looking at hardware, theres really nothing on par with the Mac. The only other thing I’d add is that you can always have mobility without sacrificing big screen! I have a big screen on my desk and when I’m there I just plug my laptop into it!

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Groovy, thanks for additional info.

    I’m leaning towards the Macbook Air top end based on the “plugin when a bigger screen is available theory”. I don’t mind osx, BSD is a fine unix core and home brew can suffice as a package manager. Admittedly, I’m a little biased towards Ubuntu now, but I’m not 100% satisfied with any of it’s IDEs/code editors.

    Btw do you feed your posts to twitter or buzz in any way? I find I’m going there more than my RSS reader (weekly on RSS, daily on twitter, every other day on buzz).

  • http://in8sworld.net/ iN8sWoRLd

    Macbook Air’s lack of dedicated mic-in kills it for me since I like to be able to line in with headphones on to record. On OSX: being able to run some commercial programs like Photoshop natively is awesome, but I’ve always had more trouble getting the FOSS tools installed on OSX than in Linux. Latest issue was with getting PyGame (Python module) installed which was a breeze in Ubuntu and near impossible on the Mac, but have had similar tussles with mySQL and lots of other tools which you’d think should be just as easy as anywhere else in the *nix world but aint. So, its a love / hate relationship I have with Mac, but I certainly don’t regret using them.

  • http://in8sworld.net/ iN8sWoRLd

    I don’t feed my posts to Buzz, FB, Twitter or anyplace anymore. I was getting really annoyed that my posts were “frozen in time” on these other sites and subsequent changes I’d make to them weren’t reflected out on those sites. Also, all the comments made to my posts were tied up in some system I didn’t control. I have come around a little with Disqus and might consider adding it to my blog again because it allows me at the least to gather up the posts I make elsewhere in one place – and I highly approve of the fact that they offer a way to export them. BUT, I’d rather just have OpenID working again (it broke after WP 3.0) since I really think thats the best solution.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    I’ve been around the Disqus topic before, and every way I think about
    it the tool adds value.

    To me as a blogger, Disqus commenters just jump in with an instant
    sense of community recognizing friendly faces of fellow commenters.
    To commenters frictionless sign in, we can track down our updates
    wherever they are made, and even follow our friends comments as well.
    I love that feature, and pull that feed into my rss reader (open).
    Our comments are exportable and split between our blog and disqus (new
    comments always show up in wordpress).
    Spammers are caught and tracked more easily.
    And finally and most importantly, I’ve grown to trust Daniel Ha one of
    the cofounders of the platform.

  • Pingback: Mac OSX Snow Leopard vs Ubuntu Linux Lucid Lynx Week One » Victus Spiritus

  • http://in8sworld.net/ iN8sWoRLd

    Can’t reply to your comment above about Disqus (theres only a Like button no reply) but I’ve tried to install Disqus on WP3.0.1 twice and failed. Each time it runs through the whole install, and it seems to be working (all existing comments got ported to Disqus ok too) but they are no longer visible in WP! Since I obviously don’t wanna lose all my existing comments, I have deleted the plugin.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    hmm.
    All my comments show on both wordpress and DISQUS.

    maybe a test blog is a good way to make sure its working properly. I imported them, and went to my Disqus moderation panel to work everything out. It should never delete comments from your blog.

  • http://viettelonline.com/ USB 3G

    Be awared. It does not like Orange Juice :)