I went to Best Buy yesterday, where there are PCs alongside Macs, and I noticed a distinct lack of manufacturing quality in the PCs. Hard to believe considering that Macs and PCs are built in the same factories, by the same people, but the quality level of the Macs was significantly higher, more than explaining and making up for the higher prices.

It turns out that in order to make a $600 laptop, you have to cut every corner in the book. I now have more appreciation of why Steve doesn’t want to be in that market, despite all the people screaming for him to enter it.

That being said, I’m about to buy a MacBook Pro at long last replacing my historic PowerBook G4. I’m actually looking forward to trying Vista safe in its VMWare or Parallels partition, just to see what all the fuss is about.

Based on cursory observation of the systems at Best Buy, the aesthetics look undercooked, and there are numerous design flaws obvious to the eye.

When looking at the cheery Welcome Screen with its speed measurements, I discovered I was only two clicks away from what looked like a horrendously confusing 50 page explanation of every metric used for the rating, complete with cross references and descriptions of individual video cards. I closed it quickly to preserve what was left of my sanity. As Steve Jobs says, sometimes less really is more.

D

Having said that, my laptop of choice is the MacBook Pro. My next laptop, will most likely be another MBP, but my OS very well won’t be an Apple OS. Since Vista’s release, I’ve had it running in VM on my MBP. Quite some time ago, I made a bootcamp partition, and have run Vista fully (not in VM), and am impressed with the speed (or in Apple terms, “snappiness”, of the OS). My MBP is a 2.16 C2D with 2 GB RAM, and it runs extremely fast, and runs anything I need to run without a hitch. I’d safely say that 75% of the time I’m on my MBP, I”m in Vista. The rest of the time, I’m in OS X, is mainly b/c of my photos being organized in iPhoto.

Not that I have anything against Leopard, or TIger… I do have issues with every OS X pre-Tiger though… but quite honestly, it doesn’t offer me anything special, and I prefer my Vista experience.

I’m in the minority, but its the truth.