Despite Chris and his Powerbook coming to my rescue when my company-owned Wintel laptop couldn’t connect to a VGA overhead projector at last Wednesday’s Denver JUG meeting, I’m still concerned the Mac won’t work for me. I wouldn’t be able to run JDK 5.0 for some time, and that generally seems to be true for a lot of software: It comes out on the Mac much later or not at all.

Then there’s the $700 to $800 “penalty” for buying a Mac, for which Chris had a great response: How much is my time worth when I waste it getting Windows or Windows apps to cooperate.

I did check out the Powerbook at a computer store. The user interface seemed to act sluggish, and I don’t think it was just because I was biased by Matt Raible‘s regular rags about the slow Powerbook. Nothing jumped out at me as being impressive. I certainly did not put the Powerbook through its paces, so in no way was I being fair to the Mac. But the big price tag, and the concern that, say, WebLogic 9 won’t run on it makes me want to steer clear for now.

I appreciate the many people who tried to get me to see the light. When I have enough money to afford a second laptop, it’ll probably be a Mac just so I can experience what everyone tells me is the one, true way.