PC or Powerbook

I'm in need of some serious input. Today dell has come out witha nice coupon. For a small amount less then a 12in powerbook (1.5/512/60GB) I can pick up a 700m (1.6/1GB/60GB). Now I would just like to know peoples opinion, on what may be a better deal.

I use PC's for the most part, but I have no problems with Macs. What I'm wondering is functionality. I program alot as I'm a CS major and I have 1 year in college left. Will I be able to program in C/C++/Java/Basic/...? Are there programs that can do this? If I get VPC and install XP or some OS to run VS.net will it be slow. These are my concerns and ones of this nature.

Thanks,
DonSandro

The design of the powerbook is really nice. I really like its sturdy feel and the keyboard is just plai awesome. However, its funtionality is really limited if you're primarily a PC user. One thing I don't like about the 700m is it has a really small keyboard. The keys are too small so it's very easy to hit 2 keys at the same time while typing.

with a pc you can undervolt your cpu core and get better temps and crazy batterylife... some people have reported .8v or lower stable with pentium-m's or you can overclock your laptop for maximum performnce there's about 50/50 chance you can overclock with i8600...

on top of that you can get a cheap laptop now and then upgrade it later... I've heard any kind of programming is difficult with a mac....

Programming is great on a Mac, as long as your college doesn't require Windows-type things, like .NET or VC++ project files. My Powerbook is perfect for programming at my school because the curriculum encourages and requires use of a UNIX account. All the upper-division courses require programs to run in UNIX, and since the Mac is UNIX-based, it works out perfectly. In addition, if you have a project that's large enough to require a project file and such organizational aids, XCode works wonderfully not only for Mac-specific Cocoa, but also for Java and UNIX C/C++. But, if your courses involve Windows programming or .NET, you'd be better off getting a Windows laptop, because emulation doesn't turn out to be very fun.

if you use PC the most then get a PC based laptop - MAC laptops are great on battery life, but so are the dell 700's

also, you are more likely to be able to upgrade the processor in a Dell then a MAC.

For general productivity, the Powerbook is definitely the way to go. Coding on it for anything but a Windows environment is great. I did web application development in PHP and ASP for a few years without the use of a PC at all.

However!

If you need Visual Studio, forget it. Get a PC. While VirtualPC is totally capable of running any Windows application you can ever need, it's painfully slow--and I don't perceive it as being slow in a way that you can directly compare it to an older PC. It's more like it's quick, but has some weird bottleneck that's always causing things to come to a halt. I had a job where I "had" to use Frontpage (which doesn't really exist for Mac in any form, or at least there wasn't a modern version at the time), and simply attempting to use FP extensions to interface with the client's site was an absolute nightmare. It was like trying to stuff Longhorn into the Packard Bell 486SX/25 I had back in the early 90s.

So, in short, it depends on what you can get by with. If you can honestly say "there's a Mac replacement for everything I need," then the Powerbook is perfect for you. If you can't find a way to live without Visual Studio, get a PC.

DonSandro said:

I use PC's for the most part, but I have no problems with Macs. What I'm wondering is functionality. I program alot as I'm a CS major and I have 1 year in college left. Will I be able to program in C/C++/Java/Basic/...? Are there programs that can do this?

Click to expand...

Code Warrior & XCode (free) will do Java, C, C++. BlueJ is available on the Mac as well. RealBasic will do what you need for Basic but it does get a bad rap because most RealBasic apps are annoying (dumb basically) but you can use it to create functioning code for Windows, OS9, & OS X last time I checked. OS 9 support may have been dropped not that thats too important. I use XCode & BlueJ for java personally. BlueJ is required for my APCS class so I cut my teeth on it more or less.

If I get VPC and install XP or some OS to run VS.net will it be slow. These are my concerns and ones of this nature.

Click to expand...

Depends on what you call slow. A 1.5GHz G4 should emulate a 600MHz PC at least. Your milage will very of course but it is doable. Maybe it'll be a little faster, I'm really not sure. I stopped using Virtual PC once I got my real PC & obviously Virtual PC is pretty slow on my Mac because of it being a G3 & having a slow FSB. It emulated about a 200MHz Pentium. Feels a little slower since it has other tasks to do like run iTunes, iChat, my mail program, & my web browser. Its fast enough to run Wolfensein 3D & Carmageddon though . On an iMac G3 running at 600Mhz with a 100MHz FSB it felt a lot quicker & was supposedly a 270MHz Pentium. It actually did feel like it was about there if not a little faster. It ran Linux a good bit better than my Mac did. A 900Mhz G3 iBook was a good bit faster too & I imagine a G4 would feel pretty good in Linux. I'm not sure about windows of course. Theres a little more eye candy in XP.


Personally I will be pretty biased here & say go for the Powerbook since I really think Apple makes the best laptops & thats after using a lot of them at the school I've done some work at. On the bottom on the list I put Gateway & Dell is up there towards the top under IBMs which I find to be really good but still I like Powerbooks better.

Moto7451 said:

Code Warrior & XCode (free) will do Java, C, C++. BlueJ is available on the Mac as well. RealBasic will do what you need for Basic but it does get a bad rap because most RealBasic apps are annoying (dumb basically) but you can use it to create functioning code for Windows, OS9, & OS X last time I checked. OS 9 support may have been dropped not that thats too important. I use XCode & BlueJ for java personally. BlueJ is required for my APCS class so I cut my teeth on it more or less.

Click to expand...

Now that's the information I'm looking for. I just got the Powerbook and this is the sleekest laptop I've ever used, the smallest too besides the Dell latitude 500HST (which would be the best if it had a higher resolution), however, this unlike any other laptop feels solid, and the keyboard, doesn't bend like every Dell around. I think I made the right choice, and I thank everyone for their input.

Sandro