Re: Laptop recommendation

[Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

I think if you strongly prefer the Macbook then you should go for it. I 
don't see a downside if you only need git and Confluence. If you need to 
also run Windows you can do it on the Macbook with things like VMware. I 
have friends who do that and claim Windows runs well on the Mac, and I 
would tend to believe them. I personally would have to think about it 
more because I'm not the audience for Apple products. I'd get one if I 
needed to for a client (like, say, if their developers all thought 
MacBooks were cool and I'd get along better if I had one too, or if the 
bash command line shell was causing me too much trouble on Windows).

Being able to run Windows well on a Mac is not because Macs are superior 
in some mysterious way, it's because the Mac OS X EULA won't allow you 
to run OS X elsewhere (such as on a Windows machine in a VM). (Although 
people do run OS X under Windows but it's sub-legal and a pain to get it 
right.)  If Apple loosened their OS X EULA, then companies like VMware 
would likely make it easy to run OS X on other than Apple hardware. 
Otherwise I'm sure they'd be sued by Apple.

But I've used ThinkPad W520s for years and like them, with Windows 7. 
The T models like the T540 are lesser-spec than W models but probably 
good too. I intend to stay on my ThinkPads with Win7 and skip Windows 8 
until Windows 10 comes out, just like I skipped Windows Vista.

Mark Giffin
Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
http://markgiffin.com/