{"id":1870,"date":"2008-03-19T11:36:41","date_gmt":"2008-03-19T18:36:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=1870"},"modified":"2008-03-19T11:36:41","modified_gmt":"2008-03-19T18:36:41","slug":"the-great-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2008\/03\/19\/the-great-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since my laptop was stolen, it&#8217;s time for me to think about getting a replacement.  My last laptop was a tablet PC, a Toshiba M400 Portege, which was &#8220;Vista capable,&#8221; which I&#8217;m pretty sure means that it was &#8220;just barely Vista capable.&#8221;  I loved having a tablet PC, but the Toshiba wasn&#8217;t exactly behaving great under Vista (slow, slow, slow.) So now the question is what should my next laptop be.  In particular I am almost tempted to (close you ears Seattlites)&#8230;.buy a Mac.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nTablet PC benefits:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>All my notes are on my tablet for the last few years.  This is very convenient.  Unfortunately the software isn&#8217;t yet as awesome as it should be for a tablet as used by a theoretical scientist.  I.e. there is no automatic conversion of equations to LaTeX, no good searching for equations, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Teaching with tablets, especially when using <a href=\"http:\/\/classroompresenter.cs.washington.edu\/\">Classroom Presenter<\/a> where the students also have tablets, feels like an improvement over teaching (bludgeoning) by Powerpoint.  On the other hand, blackboard teaching still feels more natural to me.<\/li>\n<li>Momentum: I&#8217;ve been using a PC now since 1993 (prior to that I was an Apple diehard), so all of my files and junk is native to the platform.  On the other hand, for the things I care most about: Powerpoint, LaTeX, etc it should be easy to transfer some of these over (is there an easy way that reliably converts powerpoint to keynote?) <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Mac benefits:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Mac OS X.  I&#8217;m not a Unix-head, but having command lines around would make me feel like a kid again.<\/li>\n<li>Ability to run Windows software.  This lessens my worry about the momentum problem listed above.  I worry about any speed hit.<\/li>\n<li>I can program my iPhone.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s pretty.  I like pretty.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So any recommendations?  Anyone buy a new tablet recently that they love?  Recommendations between a standard MacBook and a MacBook Pro (I&#8217;m less tempted by the MacBook Air right now&#8230;trying to avoid early adopter remorse!)  For the record I spend most of my time doing the basics (email, internet), writing presentations (powerpoint), writing papers (LaTeX: currently using WinEdt and MikTeX), and programming simple scientific applications (speed isn&#8217;t a huge concern as if I write something really complicated it won&#8217;t be running exclusively on the laptop.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since my laptop was stolen, it&#8217;s time for me to think about getting a replacement. My last laptop was a tablet PC, a Toshiba M400 Portege, which was &#8220;Vista capable,&#8221; which I&#8217;m pretty sure means that it was &#8220;just barely Vista capable.&#8221; I loved having a tablet PC, but the Toshiba wasn&#8217;t exactly behaving great &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2008\/03\/19\/the-great-debate\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Great Debate&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[76,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-self-meet-center-center-meet-self","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1870\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}