I went and bought myself a MacBook Pro. This is big news for me because it is a culmination of a lot of computer soul-searching which, for a guy who spends most of his waking hours in front of computers, is a pretty big deal. This is the story behind the path I have chosen.

A bit of history:
* My reminisces about a 1996 Mac clone.
* In 2001 I got my first Mac laptop, a cute white 12″ iBook.
* End of 2003 my 18-month-old 15″ Titanium PowerBook broke, and looking back I think thats probably the best machine I ever had, except for, ya know, the breaking.
* Soon after, I got my new Aluminum PowerBook, and liked it, except for the size and weight and battery life. That’s what I’m writing on right now, it has served me well for almost 2.5 years.
* Two weeks ago I wrote about my crisis of faith in the Mac platform, and pondered moving to Linux as my only platform, and that only a few weeks after discussing a new computing direction that involved using more Apple-created programs, like Safari instead of Firefox. This is the period we can refer to as the “time of vicissitudes.”

Get all of that? Its okay, I didn’t expect you to, that’s why I put all the pertinent bits into a bulleted list!

This all started when I decided that living in a four computer world was far too confusing for me, and I wanted to get it down to two. I was running a Mac desktop and a Linux tinkering box at home, a Linux desktop at work, and a Mac laptop that shuttled between the two. I could never figure out what was stored where, and no way were any of the machines in sync with each other.

Through almost three years of college I lived in a two machine setup, with a Linux desktop and a Mac laptop, and I switched between the two depending on what I was doing. It was fun, it was useful, I learned a lot about Linux, and nothing was ever in sync. My new plan, starting about a month ago, was to move to a two machine setup centered around my laptop, with all pertinent day-to-day stuff on there, and all of my bigger files — music, audiobooks, pictures, tv shows, and random old stuff — stored on my Linux box.

And that is what I did.

There are a lot of really good things about living off of a laptop. Everything you ever work on is pretty much constantly at your fingertips. You never have to look for a missing document on a disk or another machine. This is majorly amplified by Mac OS X’s new Spotlight search functionality, which makes it nearly effortless to search for something across your entire computer, including documents, emails, music, RSS feeds, chat conversations — pretty much everything. It is amazing and amazingly powerful once you start to use it, and gets infinitely more powerful when you are doing absolutely everything on the one machine.

My loyal readers (ha!) are well aware of my fascination-bordering-on-obsession with the idea of wearable computing, pervasive environments, augmented reality, and infinite memory. Wearables have not come as quickly as I thought, hoped, dreamed they would, but new technologies are continuing to evolve on the desktop that are getting us closer to that reality. The massive array of metadata (data that describes data) that is being added into Mac OS is cause for great celebration, and at the center of all that is Spotlight, a generic indexing system that can let you search *everything* in new and exciting ways. For this one feature alone, this important architectural choice embedded deep in Mac OS X, the Mac is the absolutely superior desktop platform at the moment. And in the end, I could not leave that behind.

So I switched my mail to Apple Mail, my calendar events to iCal, my addresses to Apple’s Address Book. None of these programs is inherently superior to its competitors — in the case of Mail and iCal, both are probably inferior — but all of them tap into Spotlight, something that a lot of the third-party apps simply don’t do, at least not yet. Mail is annoying, but I deal with its quirks because I want everything organized in “smart folders” with metadata and tagging and spotlight searching. And the Apple apps are getting better, iTunes is really marvelous, iPhoto has gotten a lot more usable. IChat sucks, but Adium is amazing, and in the next version will support Spotlight. Best is how so many of these apps integrate with each other, so that you can have one shared contact database and one shared event spool and one dictionary file, and, best of all, one password store that is safe and encrypted and integrated into everything.

There is nothing in Windows or in Linux that can match this level of integration, and this level of integration is what is most wearable like to me, and it is what is going to keep me with the Mac.

So I bought a MacBook Pro, and I bought more RAM to deal with the RAM-hungry OS X apps, and I bought a second battery to deal with the not great battery life, and I bought a second power cord because the new power adapter won’t work with my old ones, and I bought a special laptop stand because the thing gets so darn hot. I did all of these things because, although the Mac is not perfect, although the MacBook Pro is not the best laptop in the world, I am willing to put up with all the quirks and caveats and the OS X cruft because, in the end, it is the best thing out there. I’ll continue to complain, you can have no doubt, but Mac OS X is superior to Linux and to Windows in the sort of user experience I crave, and so it is with Macintosh that I shall stay, the same platform I’ve used since I first started using computers.

Is my choice right for everyone? Of course not. You have to make your own decisions about what setup best suits you. But I am now convinced that it is the correct decision for me, to the extent that I willingly plunked down $2500 in hard-earned cash for a faster new machine because, frankly, my old machine just can’t keep up with my new work habits, and, with all the processing abuse I’ve been throwing its way lately, has started to show its age. I don’t believe that Apple can do no wrong, I in fact think they do a lot wrong. But in the end, they do enough right to make it worth it to me to pay a little more, put up with a few more annoyances, and get a not-quite-perfect computing experience by moving my entire base of operations to one slab of aluminum and silicon and copper and plastic.

So yeah, I’m pretty darn excited about my new computer. Its an neat new adventure, and all it took was paring down from four computers to two.