Last week, I received my new 15” PowerBook. I got it all maxed out with faster hard drive, more video memory, and 4x DVD burner. After playing with it for a week, this thing totally rocks. My previous laptop was an IBM Thinkpad running Red Hat Linux. Suffice to say, there really is no comparison between the two. The physical feel of the PowerBook is much more solid. It’s compact and well designed. It’s the little things like the LED on the power cable to let you know if your battery is charging that show Apple really paid attention to the details.

OS X 10.3, a.k.a Panther is great. There are not a whole lot of major improvements over Jaguar, but lots of little ones. Mail is nicer with its threading and seems much faster. Address Book is nicer with the way it merges imported vCards rather than duplicating them. The new Finder just feels slicker. Exposé is not just eye candy. Then there’s everything else that “just works” as compared to Linux: dual monitor support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DVDs, power management. Overall, it’s just a much more polished feel than Linux. And I really don’t see desktop Linux approaching OS X any time soon, unfortunately.

So this is it. I have an iMac at home and now a PowerBook for work. I officially no longer use Linux on the desktop. I can’t say I’m all that broken hearted. I still use Linux for my server, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But it’s for real. OS X is simply the best Unix desktop out there. Period.