My laptop came back from the repair shop today with nothing fixed and a quote that cost almost $140. And all they did was confirm what I'd told them.

Early on in the piece Adam and I had talked about how not having the laptop was going to hinder my work and we decided that if there was any uncertainty with how long it was going to take to get repaired that we'd hire a replacement Apple PowerBook. OS X is Unix based so I get all my tools out of the box. If push comes to shove I can install Ubuntu on it an know that the hardware is fully supported (minus the wireless, which I can cover with a PCMCIA card I have floating around).

So far it's fun to play with but there's a few things that I'm not liking. First up the keyboard lacks a nipple, which means that I have to use the trackpad. This is seriously uncool. I've connected my Bluetooth mouse and it works OK but is a little slow to respond. That might just be normal though, as I seem to recall the same thing under Windows (all that time ago) and Linux. Having one mouse button is fine, but highlighting doesn't automatically copy the text to a buffer.

The wrist guard is a little hard on my wrists and I wonder how extended periods of hackery will fare on my poor hands. It is very smooth, and shiny. JPEGs don't thumbnail like they do in GNOME. I have much less screen real-estate, though with Expose this is is a reduced hassle.

I'm expecting that a lot of what I'm not loving can be changed with configuration tweaks, but not knowing my way around the OS might make that hard... not that I'm scared of getting my fingers (and someone else's PowerBook) dirty in the process.