So I finally broke down and got a new Mac laptop the MacBook Pro to replace my 3ish year-old PowerBook. The initial impression I have is very positive. It's got a very Buttery (tm) experience. It feels way more responsive (as would be expected with dual core CPUs, each of which is faster than my single CPU in the old one) than my 1 GHz PowerBook G4.
Darwin Ports
I've been using Fink for quite a while, but during this transition I decided to check out Darwin Ports instead. Both of these systems provide an easy way for installing and maintaining a wide variety of the Unix utilities that are available. They handle dependencies and offer an easy interface to update to the latest version, uninstall, etc. Fink is based on the Debian apt/dpkg scheme. The Mac on Intel support for Fink is a little lacking currently and the packages seem to be rather out of date. They have Rubh 1.8.1 for example, which is even older than the one supplied by Apple.Darwin Ports is a source based system fashioned more after the BSD ports collections. Darwin Ports has always been focused on the OpenDarwin project which ran on both PowerPC and Intel architectures, so the "transition" to the Intel architecture was much less of an issue for them. Darwin Ports was easy to install and easy to use. In a matter of minutes (did I say how fast the MacBook Pro is?), I had downloaded and compiled the latest version of Ruby, readline, openssl, etc.
Photo Booth
The MacBook Pro includes a built in iSight (branded) camera. The surprisingly fun Photo Booth utility is included. This is a simple little application that lets you take snapshots with the built in camera. It includes some simple effects which make the thing hilarious. You can take Fun House pictures of yourself that will have you cracking up.So far I've found a couple of applications that I use that are not yet Universal Binaries like QuickBooks. No major complaints though, they are at least as fast as my older laptop which is fine for me.
I just can't wait for the weekend so I can get some unintterupted playing time. :)