The Dark Side
For the first time in 10 years, I have a Windows machine again. Don't worry, I still own (and love) 5 mac machines.
I needed something small and light that would enable me to perform development tasks wherever I am, but also be comfortable as something to just pull out in a cafe and check email. So I bought a netbook.
Apple doesn't do a netbook model. They have held back from stepping into the market - it would cannibalise their revenue and they know it.
I bought an Asus 1008HA which slips into my bag comfortably, gets good battery life and has a keyboard with sensibly-sized keys, for a netbook. It also comes with Windows. I bought it with the full intention of hacking OS X onto it, but you know what? Windows isn't so bad. I installed Windows 7 and it runs surprisingly smoothly.
The OS doesn't have the grace of OS X of course. There are some quirks of user experience that make me smile and say "ah, Windows", but as far as meeting the needs of a web developer on the go, within a few hours I had:
- Installed XAMPP for running a local apache server
- Installed IE Collection for doing IE testing across various versions
- Installed Firefox as the browser I'll actually use :)
- Installed E Text Editor to do code editing
- Installed Cygwin to take care of my terminal needs such as SVN / SSH etc
I am actually quite enjoying using it. It's a profoundly strange experience buying a whole computer for about $400, when I'm so used to paying $2000+ for Apple hardware.
That said, I will never stop being an Apple fanboy :) But Steve, do me a favour and don't bring out an Apple netbook just yet.
