Comparing a Macintel to a PC
I've been borrowing my mother's Macintel notebook so I can try it out. The main things I do with a laptop are to run fireklumpen and run telnet sessions to PROPER computers (Mastodon linux, and I occasionally telnet to *BSD and commercial Linux boxes for sysadmin and work reasons), so it doesn't really matter if I'm running Microsoft Windows or MacOS, so this gives me a good chance to actually compare the hardware I'm running on. The Macintel box is, not surprisingly, wicked fast (which makes the periodic vanishing cursor episodes particularly puzzling), but the keyboard and pointer layout on it sucks dead bunnies through a straw. I'm used to laptops that have got a full complement of arrows and home/pgup/pgdown/end keys (it would be better if waterbuffalo had vi keybindings, but bulk move commands are good no matter how they're done), but the Macintel box has only got arrow keys, and you get to shift them if you want the others. This is a lot more annoying than I thought it would be, and if it wasn't for having to constantly drag my finger across a touchpad it would really drive me nuts. The touchpad on the mac is, um, kind of frustrating, because it doesn't take much to go skittering off the edge of the pad (and there's no good feedback when the pointer has gone off to do the great vanishing act) and because my mother would complain if I walked to the center of the Sellwood bridge and committed this offense to ergonomics to the briny deep.
As it is I'm back to using my mighty Toshiba Tecra 8200, which runs at about 1/8th the speed of the Intel Core Duo in the Macintel, but which has a keyboard and pointer layout that does not make me want to commit computer carnage.