I’m thinking about getting a Mac

Yep, you read right; I’m thinking about getting a Mac…

They’ve been around for ages with my earliest recollections of them being these funny looking boxes with Mac OS 7 on them, they were the first computer to have a mouse and a Windowed OS, more recently, they have been upgraded to be based on the FreeBSD operating system called OS X.

OS X ushered in a new era of stability for people using Macs; it provided the renowned networking stack of FreeBSD with the robustness of a solid Unix OS.  Macs have been used by graphic designers for and music enthusiasts for years, now they have hit the mainstream with their use and uptake now being second behind Microsoft Windows.  For more information on OS X, have a look at the Apple page here; also the FreeBSD home page here.  Of course, Apple’s OS X page is not to be forgotten in all this reminiscing

Still, the reason why I am seriously considering one in the near future; and by that I mean in the next month at worst, is that there has been a big upswing in the amount of clients at work that are using them and I cannot afford to pretend that they are in the minority any longer.  In the last two months, I’ve been caught short in my support abilities with the Mac to the point that I just don’t know the OS well enough to be able to support it properly.  Put me in front of one and I can find my way around it without too much trouble, however without a unit in front of me; I tend to flounder a bit and it’s just not good enough for my own standards.

So with some cash flow being freed up recently; I have the room to move and will probably look at getting one in the next few weeks.

I am considering a MacBook with the following configuration:

• MacBook 2.13Ghz
• 250Gb HDD
• 2 Gb RAM

I’m also going to get MS Office 2008 for Mac as well as it comes with a free mouse for $200.00; all up it will cost me $1816.00 including GST and shipping which is pretty good based on my shopping around.  I’m going to get it from ZeroThree in Melbourne at this stage; the owner of the store is a client at work and I know that he has great reputation in the Apple community and fantastic customer ethic.

I was going to consider a MacBook Pro, but I just cannot justify the extra cost for what I feel is only a backlit keyboard and built in SD memory slot.  The slightly faster CPU (.1 of a Ghz) is irrelevant in my opinion; USB memory card readers are cheap as they come these days.

I’d like to have 4Gb memory straight off but that can come later; the base model comes with a 160Gb drive which I am taking up to 250gb as I figure it’s easier to upgrade memory later as opposed to hard drive, having to do a whole OS rebuild as a result.

Have you bought the latest MacBook?  What is you opinion about the unit; do you think that my configuration above is solid or should I make a change somewhere?  Let me know your opinion by leaving a comment below.