I’ve been running a ThinkPad for the past year or so. Until recently, I’ve always considered IBM’s machines to be the nicest x86 hardware around. But with the new Intel Macs, that isn’t the case anymore.

And with Vista being what it is, I knew I was going to kick Windows into a VM and run a Unix host. Ubuntu looked promising until I was talked into looking at Macs by our resident zealots.

So I went out to Easton to visit the Apple Store today, and am now the proud owner of a 17-inch MacBook Pro and a 30-inch Cinema display. And holy crap, this is some nice hardware.

Here’s what I like best so far:

• The Cinema display is absolutely stunning. I’m now running 2560 x 1600 on the display, 1680 x 1050 on the monitor. This is bar-none the best you can do with a laptop. I still think there is an opportunity here with VNC (or hardware I guess), but until you can run two LCDs at better than 1280px, this is it.
• The uber-MDI user interface for all programs.
• Automator. A super-high level scripting tool for automating tasks.
• The Terminal. It’s the Bash shell.
• TextMate. An exceptional text editor.

<ul><p>And just a few complaints:</p>
    <li>Command (the Apple Key) needs to be swapped with the Caps Lock key.  I'm going to look at how to do this.</li>
    <li>Home and End don't work properly.  Instead, I'm using cmd-arrow.  This is annoying for heavy text editing.</li>
    <li>I wish more software was written to use an Alt menu</li>
    </ul>

I have a feeling we’re going to be getting more of these around Innova soon.