My girlfriend Martina has had her current Acer 12" laptop for quite some time now and she recently asked me whether she should start looking for a new one. As the Acer is equipped with the original Core Duo Intel processor (yep the really shitty one) I told her she is ready for a refresh.

When picking a new laptop her main priorities were size, weight and compatibility – she works as a professional translator and needs a lot of Dictionaries that don’t necessary run on Linux and Macs. Nevertheless when choosing we have actually eliminated all windows laptops and came to the conclusion the new MacBook would be the best choice.

The size is about right, it’s quite light – she didn’t want the original plastic MacBooks due to weight concerns and in addition it’s quite powerful. As far as the compatibility is concerned I helped her by testing all the stuff she needed on my MacBook Pro and to my pleasant surprise all of her applications either run on Mac OS X, have good replacements or you can run them through CrossOver. With her fears silenced she went on and bought the 2.0 GHz new unibody MacBook. In the coming days I will be helping her with the migration to the Mac and I hope she will get accustomed quickly. And if I come across anything interesting I’ll post it here.