[NCLUG] Desire suggestions for college laptop

[Dennis Clark]

Joseph DiVerdi wrote:
> At 2:46 PM -0600 23/06/2005, BJ Tiemessen wrote:
> 
>><snip>
> 
> Unfortunately many of the programs used in a college environment only run on Windoze so this ruled out the Apple iBook.
> 
>><snip>
>>BJ
> 
> 
> BJ,
> 
> Would you please elaborate on this point and provide a sense as to the names of some of the *many* programs.
> 
> Best regards,
> Joseph

Hmm,

   I too wonder.  In college my Mac was WAY more useful than a
Windoze box.  I used command line stuff for programming classes,
the really cool program LogicWorks is both Mac and Windoze and
was used in lots of electronics classes.  Word, Excel, etc. were
written on the Mac before Windoze could even run it, and the
rest of the stuff was web based, which is mostly agnostic.  I've
been told for years that there weren't any programs on the Mac,
but, for the life of me I've never experienced a handicap, except
in ONE place - Most embedded IDE's are Windoze only, whatever that
is worth.  These days though a lot of them are running on Mac's
(which are freeBSD, so Linux is also workable with a re-compile.)
Heck, even the music class I took used a program that was on the
Mac but not Windoze.  Me thinks you've bought in to the FUD that
M$ has spread for decades.
   The Mac is more expensive, true, but [clearly biased FUD deleted
before posting]... and Apple seems to think that form is as
important as function, so their stuff just tends to look "cooler".
I myself was getting tired of the fragility though of the OS 8
and OS 9 stuff, when I moved to OS X suddenly all that was gone
and once again stuff "just worked".
   The one downside to the Mac is that the confounded stuff just
doesn't lose value.  You just can't get a good deal on used
product like you can with Dell, people seem content to pay
premium prices on it.  Ick.  I tried to get a deal on eBay
three times for an iBook, and after shaking my heads at folks
willing to pay 90% of list for used, I gave up and just bought
it new.

Enough evangelizing, get what looks good - I've always told people
to buy the monitor, the PC's are all the same, you have to type on
the keyboard and look at the screen, so you should buy for those.

IMO, YMMV, <whatever>,
DLC