Computer Bliss

In response to my co-worker Brandon’s recent post about his computer upgrades… and possibly a little follow-up to my previous post about the MacBook Air…

I used to have two machines in my office with a total of 6 hard disks and about 300 loud fans spinning in them. One was a desktop, running a development virtual machine and a generic office/web applications. The other was a bare-metal development box for doing hardware development.

They’ve been replaced with a 17" MacBook Pro. It runs my development environment in a virtual machine (which I simply copied over from the previous machine, how nice!). It also allows me to do some crazy things like plug it into our gigabit network and use optical discs. Then, I moved my hardware box into our engineering lab and connect to it via RDP when I need to access it.

The result? My office is completely silent. I can bring the MacBook home (or anywhere) and have the actual development environment from work right there, no VPN, no VNC. It’s also a fully-functional computer, no sacrifices. Not to mention, I get to use MacOS!

If I don’t want to bring a whole full-size MacBook Pro somewhere (like the places a MacBook Air would go), I still have the iPod Touch which does a great job of running a web browser and reading email.