The power connector broke on my old laptop and with several trips coming up I really needed to get some new iron.  So the question is which one.  I originally looked at a nice Sony Vaio and then I saw one of those nice Dell XPS m1330 machines.  They have a very sweet LED screen and a nice form factor but I really wanted a larger screen.  The problem is that the m1530 doesn't yet ship with Penryn processors or a LED screen.  The other option was the MacBook Pro.  Yes, I know…

So, after a lot of consideration, I chose to go with the Mac.  Pretty easy decision actually.  The Dell configures up with 3 year warranty at $1800 and the Mac at $2200.  Now if you consider the upgrade costs for when the 1530 will support Penryn processors and an LED screen (the 1330 costs $200 more with these options), that puts the Dell at about $2000.  The difference of $200 is a small amount when you consider that the Mac is the only laptop that can run all 3 major systems today.  Yep, pretty easy decision.

So, the new Mac arrived today and I'm writing this blog entry on it.  I plan to write for the next 30 days on my experiences on the machine.  I'v always worked on Windows machines so it's a brave new world for me.  I'll be testing out Parallels and VMWare fusion for my development work and playing with such gems as iMovie and iDVD around the house.

I had several good impressions during the first hour or so of us.  Initial startup had a nice touch where it let me use the web cam to take a personal picture for the login screen.  Anyway, I have lots more to talk about but I'll save it for the next entry.