Yesterday, I did something that I never would have considered six months ago. I shelled out $2300 for a brand spanking new Mac Book Pro. I have yet to receive my shiny new toy, as it will be delivered in 7 - 10 days, but after playing around on friend’s machines and have more or less liked what I have seen. I am convinced that it was the right choice for my work needs, but it will take a little getting used to.

Over the years, I have worked almost exclusively from Microsoft products; in many flavors and incarnations. I started out with DOS, which my family stuck with until Windows 3.11 and I tried just about every version until Windows Vista Ultimate x64. As far as desktop operating systems go, I am fairly happy with Vista, but it is far from ideal as a notebook operating system.

The other real downer about the Microsoft platform is the lack of multi-language functionality. I live in Japan and I tell you, you really have to jump through some hoops to get a legitimate English language version of Vista. If you buy a notebook with Vista pre-installed, you don’t get a choice of operating system language; you have to shell out the dough for an English version and scrap the Japanese one.

The fact that OSX is multi-language is was something I had not realized until very recently. That on its own was a real selling point for me because my wife is more comfortable working with Japanese software, while I obviously prefer English. There are a few computer shops that sell dual-boot systems with Japanese and English software, but you have to pay for both of them; and at a premium too. Plus, you are giving up all that hard drive space unnecessarily.

Then there are the little things. For some reason about two months ago, about the time I installed SP1, Skype stopped functioning properly. Oh, it was still worked, but the volume kept switching to mute every single time I made or received a phone call. I tried every trick in the book to get it working again, to no avail. I probably could have spent a little longer trying to fix the problem, but time as they say is money and I don’t need the aggravation.

I am running a Quad Core CPU with 4GB of DDR2 and an 8800GTX. By rights, my machine should load in no time at all, however, there are times when it boots like I have a hard drive full of molasses. Post-SP1 and a whole bunch of updates later and it is pretty fast, but it has taken a long time to get there.

From the ground up, the Mac Book Pro is a very nice machine. I just got the cheapest 15″ version with a 250GB hard drive, but even that has speed to burn. It is more machine than I actually need for the work that I do, but in my experience it is always better to have too much machine than not enough. I plan on running Parallels so that I can make use of my Windows software and I figure having the extra power that is offered by the Pro will pay dividends in this regard.

Unlike a lot of people, I am not anti-Vista. It is great for a desktop and I am happy with the way that my computer handles first-person shooters and most CPU-intensive applications. The trouble is, it is just not practical as a laptop operating system. OSX, on the other hand does and it has a few nice touches to go with it. I am not going to go turning all Apple fanboy on anyone or anything like that; but I am hoping that it will offer me a nice productivity platform that will allow me to work effectively and efficiently from wherever I am in the world.

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