I’m indifferent on my feeling towards the announcement.  It’s cool yeah, I’ve had requests from non-techies asking me “where do I get one?!” of which my reply is to direct them towards a $500 unlocked phone in the U.S.  Some say that the iPhone in the U.S. is in part responsible for the data rates becoming affordable, I wonder if the same will hold true in Canada?  I would think Apple wants us to believe that because it all goes towards a positive reflection on their brand.

The fact is, HTC and Bell have already beaten them to the punch but I don’t think their marketing to date has been successful.  I currently have an HTC Touch from Bell on a $7/mth unlimited data plan and am loving it.  Web, gmail, twitter, google maps, texting, camera.. it’s got it all.  However, It seems as though I’m the only person in my town that knows about it!  My only beef is they charge me roaming data when I travel to Vancouver.  I suppose they gotta mess with you one way or another.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll be switching just for the sake of having one.  Monthly data rates mean more to me than saying “I have an iPhone”.  So dear Telus and Rogers:  I’ll consider switching if you change your pricing, $15/MB is ridiculous.  It’s not just about having an iPhone, the monthly costs have to be justifiable as well. </rant>

I look forward to the day where data rates are no longer the dealbreaker.  Just like broadband cable did back in the day.  Wow, was that only last decade?

It was a love-hate relationship with that machine. It had a docking station which is something that I think is missing from the Macs. Then again all I really need is just a few more USB ports so a hub will suffice. The 4:3 screen sucked, however IBM has a new version that has a wide screen so it’s a bit better. Linux was absolutely awesome – super fast, snappy response, no crashing… developing Flock was a breeze.

Windows was a whole different set of apples! The performance was absolute garbage, taking anywhere from 1-2 hours for an fbuild_all (neat little script that automatically updates subversion and builds from the root source dir). Linux was no more than 45 minutes. Now this is largely due to ccache being broken under cygwin, but even loading Thunderbird/Flock/Firefox/Pidgin/Skype makes the machine crawl. I stayed mostly in Linux because I wanted to actually get *some* work done. This created problems tho every time I booted into Windows because inevitably the tree would be so out of sync that I’d be spending a minimum of 1.5 hours just building before I could do anything. Occasionally during the build my machine would hang when it was linking large object files.

Enter the new intel Macbook Pro: As soon as I got it I immediately got my hands on a Gutsy and WinXP disc. I got my machine triple booting in probably less time than it took to do a full rebuild of Flock under my old machine. I still needed to setup the build environments on each OS, but that wouldn’t be so bad. I spend most of my time in OSX and I love it. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for all these years – nice eye candy with standardized installation of software (read: drag program into Applications folder) and a shell to interact with. Performance of WinXP is actually better than what I was getting about of the IBM – so I’m happy there.

Having triple boot on the Mac is great – I think anyone developing cross-platform software targeting the big-3 definitely need to consider Mac.