On Friday, I said goodbye to my five-year-old IBM ThinkPad A22P and hello to a new MacBook Pro.

Yes, five years.

I’ve been putting this off for a while.

Now, the ThinkPad was a good laptop - great, maybe - and it did everything I asked of it and more. I’d guess 15,000 to 20,000 hours of use, a number of trips around the globe, and more than two drop-kicks in the office parking lot. My daily routine centered around Firefox, Thunderbird, SecureCRT, VMWare (debian), and lately, FeedDemon under Windows XP. It was the only computer I used both at home and at work.

But time had taken its toll. A few days before the three year warrantee expired, the motherboard failed. IBM was happy to replace nearly everything in the system except the screen and hard drive, which I swapped out for a faster model. But after that, the speakers starting failing, suspending or hibernating XP became a gamble, and the built-in ethernet went south. In the end, though, Javascript was the laptop’s undoing. When the web was just a pile of HTML and images with a sprinking of code, my old laptop did great. When trying to parse and execute a few hundred KB of Javascript code every time I fired up GMail, my laptop ground to a halt.

I toyed with the idea of getting a Dell (”dude…”), but fell for the seductive simplicity, fast hardware, and BSD-backing of a MacBook Pro: 2 GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM. Two days in, I think I’ve made the right choice. QuickSilver is waiting to read my mind, I’ve got Darwin Ports building the latest PHP5, Firefox is snappy, Parallels has a fresh install of debian, and everthing feels right, a feeling I’ve long missed in the land of Windows.