I'd been thinking about buying a Mac laptop, for a number of reasons. Mac OS X 10.5 has finally shipped, I'm sick to death of Windows, I want a laptop that sleeps and shuts down and copies files when I tell it to without constant supervision to make sure the process completes, I need to run network simulations with ns and write networking code and cygwin is too flaky, I want to fix a Mac OS X-only bug in the development code of SaVi and then figure out why it and other third-party modules won't run under Geomview on the Mac...

And I wanted to do this over Christmas, in what little free time I had, rather than wait for the rumoured new portables at the January MacWorld. So the recently-updated Macbook looked like a good choice. But then I read of a critical copying bug in Mac OS X Leopard. The purchase will just have to wait another few OS and hardware revisions until Apple gets its act together. And even then, Macs still won't have error-correcting memory, which is why there are so many reports of adding memory leading to kernel panics.

Still, it's not as if Apple had its act together the last time I bought a Mac (a 6100/66 DOS Compatible in '96).

It looks like I'll just be spending Christmas fixing the SaVi texturemapping code to pipe directly to Geomview -- using cygwin.