I’m in the mar­ket for a new lap­top and I pur­pose­fully waited for the new Mac­Books to be released. I priced out a Dell XPS M1330 and once the fea­tures are matched up as close as I can make them, there’s a $60 price dif­fer­ence in favor of the Dell. $1599 vs $1533. The Mac­Book comes out ahead in GPU, FSB, and oper­at­ing sys­tem (OS X > Vista because of Unix) and the Dell comes out ahead in terms of con­nec­tors (HDMI, Firewire, card reader, Express­Card slot, etc.). I tried to con­fig­ure a com­pa­ra­ble Ubuntu machine, but the proces­sor speed is fixed at 2.0 GHz and eas­ily went over com­pared to the $1299 Mac­Book. The only com­peti­tor now is a late model 15″ Mac­Book Pro which for refurb starts at $1349—a very tasty price indeed. The MBP matches the advan­tages of the m1330 and has a bet­ter GPU, screen size, and res­o­lu­tion than the new Mac­Book. How much bet­ter is the GPU? Let’s see.

(more…)

I like to use my iPhone for view­ing pod­casts. How­ever, man­ag­ing them through iTunes leaves much to be desired because some pod­casts I like to view and then trash them, while oth­ers I like to archive and have synced at all times. iTunes does not have an obvi­ous way to set this up.

(more…)

Jan­u­ary, last year, I had thought per­haps my switch to Apple would begin with the first rev iPhone. By the time the iPhone debuted it didn’t pro­vide a good enough value propo­si­tion for me then. Fast-forward to July 12th, and you would have found me stand­ing in line to buy an iPhone 3G.

(more…)

Are you really sav­ing any money? Not really.

(more…)