THE PITCH

The other day a blogger that I regularly read was wondering about which laptop to buy and I ended up briefly giving him my favourite laptop sales pitch. I thought I would do Steve Jobs a favour and put it up here too.

I have been using a Mac for five years and for graphics, stability and elegance, I would never switch. And unless you are into high-def computer games, there is hardly a PC program now which does not have a Mac counterpart. On my Mac I have Pymol, Chemdraw, SciFinder, Mercury, iNMR, DeepView, all the standard media players, Adobe software, Google programs, and of course the three MS Office programs. On the other hand, Keynote as a counterpart to PowerPoint is super. iPhoto is a terrific photo organizer. I find Safari as a web browser to be perfectly adequate and there's also Firefox. On the new Macs, the tiny pinhole serving as a high-res camera is really neat. MPlayer is a general purpose media player that works with almost any format. The one long standing gripe I have is about Yahoo Messenger which has not upgraded its Mac version yet and still exists in its Middle Ages form. But that's of course Yahoo's fault.

I also second the comments about long battery life and virus-proof OS. With a fully-lit screen I get 2 hours, with a dimly-lit one about 3.5-4. Do use the battery often otherwise it may die rather early; don't keep the machine plugged in all the time as I once did. I do have a slight problem with heat but it's not that big a deal. I have never found compatibility with projectors to be a problem, although for the new Mac you *must* not forget the attachment.

Two years ago, my Mac in a backpack fell rather violently from the seat to the bus floor when the renegade driver braked too hard. Didn't cause a single discernible problem.

The only off-putting feature is of course the price and that would be an issue for you if as you say you just want a second computer. But you can get a 13.5 inch for 1099$ or 1299$ which is quite an adequate size and price. Until now I have not met one person who used a Mac for any reasonable amount of time and wanted to then switch to a PC.

Don't the words just effortlessly gush out when you like something so much?