[thelist] iBooks, OS X, Macs, Web Development, Laptops, Etc, Etc

Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov
Tue Jun 11 14:38:01 CDT 2002


All,

I'm a soon-to-be CptS graduate student and don't yet own my own computer.
I'm planning on purchasing a laptop for school, and, though I have never
used a Mac, I have been eyeing some laptops in particular from Apple --
specifically, their new 14.1-inch 700mhz G3 iBook. Apple seems to have a
tremendous reputation for building notebooks that are tough, light, quiet,
and cool.

How do you folks feel about doing Web work on Apples? This would be
hobby-stuff, not really serious contract or academic work, but I would
expect to be able to run a reasonable CMS development environment on it:
PHP, Apache, some sort of DBMS (MySQL, Postgres?), etc. I know all this
stuff runs on OS X (since it's based on BSD) but the question is -- does it
work *well*? Do any of you prefer Macs over PC's for Web development?

Any words of wisdom on laptops in general? I plan to run Linux on whatever I
end up purchasing, so that rules out some of the cheaper offerings that use
no-name video chipsets/shared video memory/soft modems and soundcards.

Aside from the Apple, I'm looking at a Dell Inspiron 4100. It's got more
features (4x better graphics card, IR port, 1.13ghz processor, etc) at about
the same price, but doesn't appear to be as built for mobility as the Apple
(though it's close).

--
Jonathan McPherson, LMIT/SD&I
Software Engineer & Web Systems Analyst
email / jonathan_a_mcpherson at rl dot gov



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