Tikkabik

I've been using a 17-inch MacBook Pro since shortly after Christmas, and this is absolutely the best laptop I've ever had. Not only is it markedly faster than the laptop it replaces -- my 17-inch PowerBook, which had a 1.5GHz G4 chip inside -- but it's also greatly more flexible, capable of running both Mac OS X and Windows.

I've installed Boot Camp for those rare times when I'm actually motivated enough to restart my Mac in Windows to play a Windows game, like Half-Life 2. But for the most part I've been using Parallels Desktop for Mac, which lets me run Windows without rebooting first. It comes in particularly handy when I hit a Web site that I'm having trouble with in Safari and Mac Firefox, or if I want to run a utility that's not Mac OS X friendly. And thanks to Coherence, a new feature of Parallels Desktop that enables you to run Windows executables straight from the Mac OS X dock, it's almost irrelevant about what kind of host OS my applications need.

It's weird. The lines between Mac OS X and Windows are really starting to blur. Here's another practical example: I'm also playing around with a development version of Myst Online: Uru Live, a GameTap game that uses Cider, TransGaming's virtualization technology for Mac OS X. Like Coherence in Parallels, it enables you to run a Windows application from Mac OS X, but unlike Parallels, it doesn't require you to have a full version of Windows installed -- instead, Cider encapsulates the Windows executable and makes it run as a Mac program.

Regardless, the Mac OS X experience -- and the Mac hardware experience -- is still so much better than Windows it's worth it. But I'd defy anyone to show me a laptop computer that's as powerful and as flexible as what I'm using today.