Adam talked me into buying a Macbook. It’s not overly hard to talk me into buying technology so lets not give him too much credit. Really, all I needed was a laptop that could do basic Internet type stuff and run VMware. As you may have read earlier, we were swamped with scanning so I had to push two boxes to be scanning machines, which left me with limited ability to do real work or to stay up on business stuff like email.
So my experience so far: Everyone knows Macs are pretty. They’re light and have small sleek form factor. The display is lovely. They keyboard is spacious and easy to use. The touchpad took a bit to get use to, but overall I’m not happy with it. It’s multi-touch capable and overall a nifty tool once you learn how to use it.
Software is actually good. Vmware Fusion is nicer and more responsive than either VMware Workstation or Server. Graphics run far faster and it’s a nicer experience. Additionally, you can use “Unity” and run Windows software on the Mac desktop. The only thing that really irks me is that there isn’t a Vmware-server-console or a Firefox/Safari plugin to access VMware server easily. So access is through a contrived VM in a VM type thing or over X11. It’s ugly, but it’s been fairly successful.
Port is my friend. It installs basically everything you might want. It has some quirks, but being a Gentoo guy I’m use to a certain amount of pain when moving to a new OS. Port builds from source and usually works — once you learn a few tricks. I have Wireshark, libpcap, libnet, scapy, python, CANVAS, metasploit, kismet, nmap, and hping working. Nessus has an install for Mac.
My Verizon Mobile Card works fine
MS Office is fine. It looks a little different but it’s Office.
Hardware is blazing. I have 4 gigs of Ram. A 250 gb hard drive and a 2.4Ghz Core duo.
Overall, I think it’s a very positive experience and I’d recommend it if you have a bit of tim to invest in getting familiar with the OS and getting the tools that you need onto the box.