Thought I’d do a quick recap of my week-long, multi-state travel experiment with a MacBook in place of a PC.

Bottom line: I almost didn’t notice a difference.

Not sure what to make of it really… I figured that I’d either be jones’ing for the comfort of knowing every little bit of a PC or that I’d be blown away by OSX, considering the hype of Apple… neither happened. Sure, I missed the SD reader on my Lenovo, but not enough to unpack it and turn it on. Sure I was greatly impressed by StarPlayrXM on the Mac but they also have a PC version as well…

I think the biggest drawback to the MacBook was the smaller resolution of 1280×800. My Lenovo is 1920×1200. Yeah, sure, that’s extreme, but I was hoping for 1400×1050 out of the 13″ screen…

Size-wise, the MacBook is ideal. Nice balance of weight and size. The loss of a PCMCIA or ExpressCard 54 slot is disappointing, but since I did no business-related work, I didn’t need a SmartCard reader.

The big hole? Work email. Entourage is icky. Mail.app is just as icky. I ended up using a VM with XP for Outlook 2007 – worked quite well with VMWare, but it’s sort of an annoying thing, since email is not a new application…

The rest of the software was mostly 1:1. What was nice about OSX is that I can remap any keyboard shortcut at the System or Application level. So I could remap a bunch of accelerators in NetNewsWire so that they matched FeedDemon. What wasn’t nice about OSX is the fact that I have to remember to tell it where I am for WiFi, so that the Proxies can reset (work vs home vs Starbucks etc.)

Navigating in Windows 7 was much improved with the new Touchpad driver but I never needed it so that too was a no-op.

I know it’s a shorter review than what you’d expect but really: most of the stuff was simply uneventful.