Mac Oultiners

Posted by David Dunham
Aug 31, 2009 at 05:23 AM

Daly de Gagne wrote:

>And then there’s the hardware: Desktop or laptop?

I’m typing this on a MacBook Air, with a Dell portrait display attached.

>Vanilla plastic MacBook or MacBook Pro?

For what it’s worth, I have a used first generation MacBook Air I want to sell. (I’m still waffling over whether it’s worth the risk using eBay.)

>Is 2 G of ram sufficient?

For most things. Maybe not for running big Mac apps next to big Windows apps. For the stuff you mention next, definitely.

>Is 2.26 GH sufficiently fast for most of the surfing, researching,
>writing things I want to do?

Definitely—the 1.8 GHz MacBook Air I’m selling was fast enough for surfing and researching. I wanted something a little faster as a software developer.

>For work at home, how practical is it to have a MacBook
>power a 24 inch monitor (now selling for about $250 Canadian?

The monitor I’m driving is 1024x1280 pixels. I’d have to look up what the original MBA does (I used it with this monitor), but the weakest MacBook now available does 1920x1200 (or presumably 1200x1920).

>Lots of questions that
>go beyond the forum’s central outliner focus - yet all related to allowing me to do the
>stuff that is my main focus now: research and writing.

Yes, but you’ll be using Opal on it, right, so it’s totally related. (As always, forum members can contact me for an Opal discount.)

>And one last question, how
>well does Windows operate on a MacBook? I have heard conflicting reports.

Some say better. My developer says he will never buy a Windows machine again. (I like using the 2-finger trackpad gestures when I boot into Windows. But I don’t boot into Windows often enough to know about any problems.)