Which just goes to show the futility of Microsoft's lame "Laptop Hunter" - or whatever they called them - commercials. The only thing MS could attack Apple on was the cost of its computers, despite the fact that MS doesn't even make computers. Apple only needed to cut its prices and bingo - another MS campaign joins the ranks of Redmond's abject failures.

Now with Snow Leopard I can just imagine Apple's next "Get a Mac" commercials: "Snow Leopard - Small, Fast, Cheap! Windows 7 - Fat, Slow, Expensive!"

Well, they certainly can't claim there machines are faster.

In the Nehalem Xeno group test, the Mac Pro came in the bottom of the mid-field for performance - and that was running the benchmarks (video and 3D encoding, for example) on Windows Vista and, where available, natively under OS X...

Where in the world? (Anywhere but) PC World.

NSFW Clicky

Phase 1 complete....ran idea past the missus....she didn't freak! I didn't say a macbook, but still, it's a start!

Is there a John Lewis within striking distance? They offer an additional years warranty over Apple, IIRC.

There will be in September - the sign is up, but it doesn't open til the 24th September.

Might be just enough time to talk the Mrs round then!

Maybe enough time for them to be stocked in this city...neither Comet, Currys or PC World have them. Still punting the older, more expensive versions.

Why not order direct? you can still do finance with Apple

This is true, but I prefer get these sorts of things in person! Maybe I'll take a trip down to Bristol sometime...

I've done it a couple of times, once the Apple guy made a mistake taking my details and we had to do it again took a further 10 minutes and for my trouble he threw in a laptop bag worth about £70, gave it to mate for christmas with an old laptop of mine, he was chuffed with it.

If you can the best place is John Lewis though, 2 year warranty at no extra cost. And 5 years warranty for all TV's

Well, the missus didn't take much convincing...if any.

...Cool!

Cool Gav. I hope you have lots of fun with it, when you get it.

OS X is nice to use. Certainly a more polished overall feel than Linux.

I miss things like the package manager from Linux Synaptic or YaST make adding new applications a doddle - rather like the iTunes App Store without the censorship... Who knew that Apple could learn from open source?

I intend to install Ubuntu on it too until I get to grips with the mac freeware that is available. I don't know how much iphoto will let me do. I don't want to have to pay for Aperture when RawStudio or UFRaw will let me do the same things. Rawstudio is available via darwin ports but I don't know how well it'll work.

Oh the bottom unibody macbook (the one like the new bottom MBP) has been dropped to £750 by most retailers around here), but to be honest, the 7 hour battery is the major selling point on the new MBP - the hard disk and RAM can be upgraded quite cheaply - 4gb RAM costs £75 in Novatech and a 500gb hard drive for less than £60, but no big rush for that.

I'd recommend doing it in a VM (Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox). I use VMWare Fusion and it is excellent for running additional machines.

I also bootcamped Vista, but I never used it, because I'd be in the middle of something on OS X and think, ooh, I need to use something in Windows... I'd just give up. Using Windows and Linux in a VM means I can do what I want, when I want.