Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

My eMac is currently away at Apple being repaired under warranty. Three days before the warranty ran out, the screen developed a dark ring around the center; I’m guessing that the degaussing gizmo has stopped working, but what would I know. I’m just glad that it’s happened now and not later.

Shortly after I lost the Mac I remembered that I’d aquired an old Toshiba laptop for installing apps on my Pocket PC. I dusted it off to use as an interim internet connection.
I’ve never owned a decent laptop, and I’ve never had much affection for them before, but now that I’m forced to use one exclusively for a while, I’m starting to come around. The screen on this Toshiba is 800 by 600 resolution and it’s running Windows 98, so that means no cleartype and that means very crappy looking fonts; horribly, horribly crappy looking fonts.

Once I get past that though (and the other shortcomings of Windows), there are some factors to this laptopping business that I’m really warming to.

For one thing, this machine is totally silent: not a peep. This is total bliss; this is something I could totally get used to. Another thing that surprised me is just how comfortable it is to use the flat keyboard and the wrist rest after using a conventional Mac desktop keyboard. Finally, of course, the fact that I can use the thing on my lap!
As an aside, I’ve never cared for the term laptop; I much prefer notebook (forgive me, it’s 5:00am so I’m rambling).

To sum up: I’m now considering an Apple notebook as a suppliment to the desktop machine. I’ve still not seen any portable that has a screen comparable to a desktop (with the exception of the super-high density screen of my VGA Pocket PC). If the clarity of that screen were scaled up to 12 or 15 inches I’d switch to a notebook and never look back. I don’t see that level of dot pitch appearing anytime soon so I wouldn’t consider investing in a new Apple portable right now, but I might just spring for a used iBook in the interim, just to get my feet wet.