The MacBook is a truly wonderful machine

.... once you take out the pitiful 512mb of RAM and bump it up to 2GB. Then it becomes an incredibly powerful little box. Add Parallels desktop and you can run whatever Intel operating system strikes your fancy. Add a USB TV tuner and its a personal video recorder. It burns DVD's that play on most people's home music players.

Yeah, I make my living on the care and feeding of Microsoft products. It's a complicated, high-demand skill. But when I get home at night I gravitate towards the Mac, eschewing Windows XP on my work-provided laptop. Well, unless its convenient to have two laptop computers in concurrent use as is the case at the moment. With Windows I'm always watching every website with a very jaundiced eye and wondering what harm it might do to my computer. The Mac requires less worry. I'm not so arrogant that I don't run antivirus software on it - I use a little-known but highly recommended antivirus package called Intego VirusBarrier.

I was also completely stunned when the Mac just plain automagically detected my multifunction printer on my wireless network - no driver install, no nothing. Such a change from the old MacOS where you pretty much had to have a postscript output device and be familiar with the black art of getting the right PPD (post script printer description) configured in both the operating system and applications like Quark Xpress as well. And its got a great unix core - the Mac platform has always cried out for a command prompt and now its got a darned powerful one.

And it just plain looks COOL.