I ordered a 15 inch PowerBook today. Sadly, it turns out that the right grant to pay for this is called my savings account; fortunately, I found out in time to get the new machine before my next trip. It should arrive in the next day or two. I'm excited. I'd better start thinking of a name...
I played on a Commodore 64 when I was a kid, then moved to PCs. One of my best friends in high school was a Mac devotee, but I never did use an Apple myself. This will be the first time in years that I'll (willingly) be using something other than Linux on my main work machine (the qualifier is important, since I've had occasion to use Sun workstations, the old Cray machine, HP machines, Alpha machines, and various other machines running UNIX -- but they're all things I used remotely). I'm curious whether it will live up to it's reputation for ease of use. The underlying system is BSD-based, and the whole thing is POSIX compliant, so I have high hopes that compiling on the Mac won't turn into the nightmare it can sometimes become under Windows. The processor and (more importantly) the memory bus are both rather faster than those on my current machine, of course, so I'm looking forward to spending less time drumming my fingers waiting for compiles to finish and for short simulations to run. I'm also looking forward to having a machine with a monitor that consistently turns on, to not having a hard lock-up every two hours, and to having a power system that doesn't periodically zap me. (Yes, I've been getting electrical shocks from my laptop, though only rarely and only recently.)
It would also seem that I'm getting a coupon for an iPod Mini. I'm not sure I would have ever invested in an iPod otherwise, but I suppose I'll try it out.