Ruse

Well, I got the chance to play with a few laptops this week and I think I made up my mind.. I think I'm going with mac. I ended up going down to a local apple store and I got to see the powerbook and ibook "in person" and I was amazed how nice it was. At first glance it was the sharpest screen I had ever seen. Everything was so sharp (for lack of a better word) and beautiful. I even tried to open up the copy of Microsoft office they had on there and typed a little bit in ~size 10 font zoomed where it would just fit screen and I could read it without squinting and having to move closer to the book. It also seemed to have enough power for what I would be doing. I tried to open various applications and multiple applications at once to see how long it would take to load and how quickly they would run and it was pretty quick - everything was smooth and had hardly any loading time.

I also got to play with a few other laptops down at best buy. I think I looked at a few Toshiba, Sony, Compaq and Gateways. I wasn't really amazed by any of these but maybe that is because Ive been using windows for so long and it just didn't have that shine anymore. None the less, they all were fine but if I were to buy from just those brands I think I would go with Toshiba because of how it felt.

So basically, after hours of reading reviews and customizing laptops from different vendors, I think that over all I'd get about the same performance anywhere if I were to spend about $1500 - the difference between them is going to be whether or not I prefer one thing over another... Power vs. Battery life, Size vs. Power, and the feel of one keyboard over another for example. While my mind is not completely made up, I'm almost positive I'll be purchasing a mac soon enough.

Edit: typo