This weekend was an exercise in avoiding doing something stupid.

I’ve been bitten by another obsession - what is it this time? 

It’s the Mac Bug…. 

You see, I’ve been thinking of replacing my work laptop with one of my own.  Currently I have a Tablet PC, a Toshiba M200 which last week had its cooling system fail.  Whilst it was in the shop (Toshiba doesn’t do onsite support, can you believe it?) I was pondering my laptop future.  Being tied to work for a decent computer is slightly annoying, and I’ve tried the two laptop thing (work and personal) for the last few months and it isn’t for me.

My personal Dell Inspiron 8500, which at the time was the bee’s knee’s but now is heavy, slow and hot (and not in a good way).  

My wife has a Mac, a G4 iBook, and I like it.  Its quick, reliable and given a choice when surfing the web, I’ll pick her’s over any of my PC’s.

So, this week Apple released the Core 2 Duo MacBook’s to accompany the MacBook Pro refresh a few weeks before that.  For a few days I was seriously looking at finding a way of parting with a shade over $4200 for a 15″ model before I took another look at the MacBook.  ($4K for a computer is seriously in la la land in my mind and well beyond anything I’ve ever spent)

The specs are almost the same, the same RAM and HDD is is nearly $1K cheaper, in return I sacrifice 0.13Ghz in clock speed, some screen real estate, dedicated graphics and firewire 800.

The clincher was graphics - I want to run Vista Aero Glass either within OS X or on the hardware using Bootcamp - and after doing some research I found out that the GMA 950 integrated graphics will do Vista Aero Glass using Bootcamp. 

Why do I want to run Aero Glass?  Um, well, if I have the PC for the next 2 or 3 years I don’t want to be the only kid in class who doesn’t get a 3D alt-tab experience (or rather, I don’t want to live in regret). 

The fact that I can run Aero on the MacBook’s GMA950 probably is what tipped me over to the MacBook - that and the black form factor.

 So, through this convoluted logic, I’ve arrived at wanting a MacBook, black, 2Ghz, 2GB Ram, 160GB HDD and a three year warrenty - now I just have to figure out a way of paying for it.

Either two things will happen over the next week, I’ll order one, or I’ll forget about it for the next few months.

My wife had better hurry up and give birth, or I suspect it will be the former!

I regret this entry is so poorly structured, but I’m tired!