Now Portable

Published 14 November 05 by Justin French, 12 comments

I’ve been meaning to write a little something on this topic for a while, and seeing posts from both Gruber and Hicks (Update: and now Dan too) has prompted me to get in there and add to the chorus.

Back in September I decided to get a Powerbook. There were quite a few recent times where I was away from the house and would have loved to have my stuff with me, but the main driving force was my trip to San Diego in October – I was going to be away from my home office for most of the month.

So I waited and waited, watching the rumour sites, asking anyone I knew with even half an opinion on the topic, trying to decide if I should wait for the revised Powerbooks or not. After the “Paris Powerbook rumours” came and went with nothing from Apple I decided that no matter what happened, I had to place an order now, otherwise I’d run the risk of not having one for the trip.

It was a solid decision, and it’s is a wonderful machine, but just over a month later (I think we were just leaving San Diego when I heard), the revised Powerbooks were announced. Oh well, I waited as long as I could.

But here’s the interesting part. When I originally placed the order, the plan was to only use it as a secondary machine. I’d grown very comfortable with my 2×17” LCD set-up on my old G4 Tower, and couldn’t really see myself needing a portable system day-to-day. The plan was to sync the machines as best I could, and leave it at that.

I bought a .Mac account, I made sure all my email was in IMAP, I took advantage of syncing functions in as many programs as I could (NetNewsWire for example), I put many files (and of course all of my client work) into Subversion, used some other tools to keep things synced up, and really tried to get into the swing of having two machines.

It sucked. No matter how diligent I was, there was always something I wanted on the tower that was on the portable, and vice-versa. And when I decided I needed to switch to the portable, it was far from “instant” or “easy” – there was this little delay where I’d sync everything, think about all the files I had changed, committed my SVN changes, etc. No thanks.

So I kissed the idea of synced machines goodbye, attempted to ignore the recent money I’d spent on the tower (second LCD, Tiger, iLife, new Superdrive, more RAM, etc) and after talking with Dan, decided that I was switching to the Powerbook full time.

I was still hungry for pixels, so I took a long deep breath and ordered the Apple 23” display as well, deciding to sell off the G4, the LCD screens and pretty much everything else I no longer needed to make that purchase a little easier to swallow.

For anyone considering such a move, I highly recommend it. 90% of the time it’s behaving just like a desktop machine, plugged into the 23” display, keyboard, mouse, back-up hard drives, ethernet, power and all those docks and gadgets that multiply on my desk, but as soon as I need to switch rooms or leave the house, I have every important file right there, and everything feels like “home”.

If you have to read hundreds of emails and answer a mountain of support tickets on the weekend, you might as well be on the balcony in the sun with a cool drink and some friends, right?