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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

That assumes you save any time at all. I use a ThinkPad with Win7 and I think honestly say that I lose no additional time vs using a MBP. In fact I'd argue it saves me time as I generally like the keyboard more and I can't stand trackpads (I turn mine off and use the stickpoint -- which I actually even prefer over a mouse).

My point... the $1000 savings for many comes with no penalty at all. With that said, I don't have a Unix environnemnt requirements, which would change the equation in a big way.

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Day to day tasks, I'm pretty equally efficient in any OS, but OSX's significant "lifetime of ownership" time savings for me has been system maintenance. I've never needed to reformat and reinstall a Mac, and when I've voluntarily done it (hackintoshing), restoring a complete system from Time Machine backups has been absolutely painless.

Major OSX updates have never been a problem either (although I've read accounts of errors happening), I've carried one Macbook from 10.4 to 10.6 without ever reinstalling. I've been burned a couple times trying to do distribution upgrades with Ubuntu, I've never had a Windows install that didn't need an occasional refresh for some reason, and I wouldn't dare upgrade from XP->Vista->7. I've not owned Win 7 long enough yet to determine if that will still be the case, but Windows' history has me skeptical.

Just my experience. The Mac price difference has paid for itself many times over for systems I depend on and family I support.

I think if you find the Thinkpad / W7 more powerful, you should go that route.

All I'm saying is that if you're planning to make on the order of $250-$300K off using a piece of equipment, $1,000 (or even $10,000, arguably) probably shouldn't be material to which one you choose.

But any dollar not spent on one part of a work setup can be spent on some other part of the work setup, so that kind of thinking can easily come out in the wash.

Depends what kind of developer you are. If you're a developer that requires a posix environment, you're definitely better off in the mac world. Thinkpad with Linux is sometimes an option if you're confident that everything is supported, but very often you'll be wasting time dicking around in the xorg.conf file to get the external display to work properly with certain monitors/configurations.

I'm also a bit surprised that you hate the trackpad -- that's the one thing I love about the mac. It supports many kinds of gestures that just wouldn't be possible on a single stickpoint. For example, I use the 3-finger swipe for navigation in chrome every day, and a 4 finger swipe for jumping to specific apps.

I'm a recent OS X convert and I absolutely loathe using trackpads. So I use a mouse. Big whoop.

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