A couple of years back, I passed up the chance to get one of the first MacBook Pro laptops with an Intel instead of PowerPC chip in it. I purchased a refurbished PowerBook G4 at a huge discount and was very, very happy with the decision.

So for my birthday, my wife allowed me to upgrade my old trusty G4. Apple also decided to nicely cooperate by releasing new MacBook Pros which meant that the now previous generation refurbs went into fire sale mode. Just what I had been hoping for!

I picked up a refurb MacBook Pro 2.6GHz system for $1849 plus tax. A full 33% off the new price from the week before. The system arrived in the traditional refurb plain brown box, but is otherwise pretty much perfect. It came pre-installed with Leopard and after about an hour of downloading updates and such, had a nice and quick new system.

The big motivation to the new MacBook Pro was to leverage virtualization to run Solaris (working for Sun, I really need to use Solaris a lot). I chose VMWare's Fusion product with Solaris 10 Update 4 (Solaris 10 08/07). It loaded up without issues, right off the DVD and I have the virtual machine running as its own separate IP address from my laptop on my home network.

It works so well in fact, that I have removed my old Dell AMD64 dual core system from my desk along with one of its monitors and hooked up the 22" ViewSonic monitor to my MacBook Pro. This has freed up a *lot* of desk space, and will probably save me a few bucks on electricity. I haven't had this much space on my desk in years!

Truly this has to be progress through technology!

Tags: Technology