It finally happened. I put thought to deed and bought a MacBook Pro.

The University of Washington Bookstore Tech Center holds a Tax Free Day on Apple computers every so often, and I decided to take advantage of one.

I went with the cheapest option: a rustic MacBook Pro with ye olde hardde drive, and a slot for optical media. None of this Retina display or flash memory business. Air is something you breathe.

The primary aim for this machine is for web work. It’s not my first time using a Mac.

As previously mentioned, I worked in a dev shop run on Macs from 2010 to 2011. Now that I’ve had this Mac for a week, I remember all the little conveniences that made web development easier. Namely, the Terminal.

In Windows world, you need a separate program to make a secure shell connection — Cygwin or PuTTY. I find myself dreading the Windows DOS prompt when I do work in the office. Switching back and forth between back-slash and forward-slash is a few microseconds of mental friction that adds up over the course of a work day.

The Terminal on my Mac gets rid of that friction and actually makes development … pleasant.

So pleasant, in fact, I’ve actually gotten quite a bit of work done. I created some new WordPress themes for this site and Musicwhore.org, learning Bootstrap in the process.

As I type this, I’m lying on my futon instead of sitting at the kitchen table. My current Windows laptop is a Dell I bought in 2007, and it’s a hulking piece of metal I wouldn’t consider setting on my lap.

I doubt this MacBook Pro is going to become my primary machine. I definitely wouldn’t use it to run Cakewalk SONAR, the digital audio workstation I use for my music projects. And I’m debating whether I want to sully this machine with Parallels and Windows.

For now, I’ll enjoy the productivity this machine is enabling.