Last weekend, my Thinkpad was having some trouble. Its battery was shot, the DVD drive was beginning to sound like a jet engine, and my hard drive was getting Disk I/O errors. In the weeks before that, I had started doing some Mac development with PyObjC, and I was wanting to get a machine in order to do some testing.

I looked into getting a netbook and installing OS X on it. The Dell Mini 10v, in particular, was known to work very well with OS X, at least with Leopard (Snow Leopard has since been known to work as well). I also looked into grabbing a Mini 9 (now known as the Vostro A90) and upgrading it to a 32GB SSD and 2GB of RAM. It would have come up to around $500. I decided to sleep on it and make the decision in the morning.

I wound up going out and walking around the Marina later. Guess what neighborhood it turns out has an Apple Store?

I wandered in and started to play with a 13″ Macbook Pro. Two hours later…

Oops.