Apple's MacBook strategy has finally done it. I have bought my first non-Apple computer since 1989. I went to the Apple Store to replace my main dev machine, a 2012-ish MacBook Pro, which worked great for me even if it did seem fiendishly heavy. But I could not get myself to buy one of the new models.
Sorry I just do not care so much about the Retina display. I want computation power and disk space. Apparently this is too much to ask of Apple. Smallish hard disks and not really enough RAM and who the heck thinks soldering that RAM to the board is a good idea? Really! And at the store I could get the barely adequate RAM or the maybe-enough disk space, but not both. If I want both, I have to order on-line. Wow. Never mind.
So I got an Asus with twice as much hard disk space and similar CPU speeds for less than half the price. I figured out enough about WIndows 8 to install Ubuntu over it and it is good. I guess if Apple's strategy is to dumb down the general-purpose computer so it can only be a phone or tablet, then they are succeeding.
It was relatively easy to get my MySQL databases moved over and to re-build my eclipse environment. I will have to recheck the Project Wonder install page. There are some details that may need to be fixed, but nothing that stopped me.
I think I am going to miss the two-finger drag on the Mac's trackpad, though. And I seriously need to figure out how to left-click on the trackpad more reliably. And hitting the grow box on the windows is a challenge, to say the least. I see the "grow box" icon and then click and, oops, missed the window again! O well. So far, this seems a small price to pay. And can Apple's DRM mess up my music collection, as it has done twice? Nope. And I am so not going to miss iTunes or the App Store....
Well, it was nice to see that installing and using WO and Wonder on non-Apple hardware is just fairly easy and just works, as it should. Now, back to work.
cheers - ray