Somewhat off-topic, but not too far:

Last night, I was trying to do a mail merge to print addresses on about 100 envelopes. The raw data was in an Excel spreadsheet. I first tried doing it on my PowerMac with Office v.X. I just couldn't coerce the thing to print sideways onto the envelopes, despite the ten different places where I could tell it the paper orientataion. Furthermore, even when I said to only print some small number of records, it would always try to print every record. That made testing difficult. The PDF output was also missing lines that showed up on screen and on paper.

I gave up, pulled out my Windows XP / Office XP laptop, and more-or-less got everything working without a hassle.



Moral of the story: depending on what you're trying to do, a Mac can be a great machine. But, sometimes, you're wandering into the land of untested software and you may be unsatisfied with the results.

Personally, I'd buy a Mac laptop in a snap if only Apple had a product in the under three pound market. The lightest Mac laptop available today is still something like 4.6 pounds. Apple invented the subnotebook with their Duo and subsequently dropped it. *sigh*

(And, whatever I did, I'd always have some sort of PC around for just these sorts of "the damn Mac doesn't work, let's try something else" emergencies.)