Let me warn you: DO NOT BUY A MACBOOK! Let me tell you my story...

A few months back, I decided to travel to china. I sold off my desktop, and because the macbook was small and nice looking, I bought it. I installed windows on it, installed bootcamp and all was fine, and I really loved this notebook for a few months.

But the thing is, in China, I was constantly on the move. And I was moving with the laptop all the time in my bag. The macbook does not deal with this well at all. Two nasty things happened: First, my hard drive failed a mere 4 months after I bought it. I lost weeks of work, and the Apple repair store would not replace it for me for 3 weeks because of chinese new year. So I bought a new hard drive and did it myself. The instructions online do not mention that you need a very strange and difficult to find screwdriver to do this.

Next thing that happend is that a piece of plastic along the edge broke off. The problem with the macbooks body is that when a piece along the edge chips off, the entire edge slowly peels of. My laptop is losing the edge, and now the resell value is less than half of the original because it looks fugly as hell.

Some other things:

* The white macbook gets dirty as hell quickly

* Bootcamp is no longer free! You need to buy Mac OSX to get the new version of Bootcamp. There are some on the torrent sites, but you never know what trojan you'll be getting, and a trojan in a kernel driver is nasty

* When booting windows, the keyboard does not always get detected at startup. When reinstalling from CD, this can be frustrating. And if you have that 30 seconds countdown on windows, you have to wait for it to countdown because the keyboard is not detected. You also cannot go into safe mode.

* There is no frickin right click on the keyboard. For development work, it's very annoying. Try using Eclipse or Visual Studio without right click.

* There are no fricking curly braces or square brackets or the pipe symbol on my macbook keyboard! You cannot open or close functions, you cannot index arrays and you cannot do a logical OR. Who came up with that braindead keyboard designs. Also, there is no printscreen key. You never know how much that screen is useful till its gone. (this is the german keyboard layout I'm talking about)

* In some rooms with overhead projects, the audio of the macbook goes on and off randomly. I learnt this the hard way when tryign to do a presentation. This probably has to do with the remote control

* The webcam is mirrored.

* If a CD is inside and your macbook has no power, there is no way of getting it out

* The macbook comes with a minidv video output, A.K.A make them pay extra money

* The coolness factor of a macbook is long gone. Everyone and their grandma own a macbook

On the positive side:
* Has webcam

I'm about to switch my laptop as soon as I can get apple to repair that hard drive for me. I've done some reaearch, and I'm going for the:

LENOVO THINKPAD x61t

It's a rugged looking tablet PC, smaller than the macbook, has a docking station and is not particularly expensive.

Conclusion: Macbook is like a pretty but crazy girlfriend. In the beginning, you are madly in love, and later you have to break up when bits start falling off!