My Macbook is now old. I bought it in Dec 2006. It came with Tiger - Mac OSX 10.4. Now a days nobody supports that OS. That has seriously hampered the usefulness of this laptop for my current development needs.
My current development needs are Android and WebGL. Android was working fine, until the recent update. After upgrading the android sdk tools to latest version, adb is giving "Bus Error". I think they didn't test it for Tiger. WebGL is available in nightly builds of many browsers. But none of them are built for Tiger, they at least need Leopard. Chromium has become browser-of-choice on my desktop box. But it is not available for Tiger. All these factors made me consider investing in new Macbook Pro. But that would put a big hole in my pocket (In India the price is approx Rs. 1,00,000). That seems absurd given that there is nothing wrong with the hardware of my current laptop.
This is when you feel thankful that you still have a choice - Linux.
I installed latest Fedora 13 on macbook. I could get Android SDK working on it with current updates. This machine has Intel 945GM Integrated Graphics controller, which supports accelerated graphics. But apparently it's not accessible unless it's booted in legacy BIOS compatibility mode. I was hoping that it will work and let me run WebGL in browsers. I am not sure if I am in BIOS compatibility mode or not, but WebGL doesn't work (although glxgears does). Fortunately Firefox very recently made it easy to use software acceleration for WebGL. So I installed Offline MESA libraries and WebGL works inside Minefield.
And for a bonus, I found that Compiz is also working. I don't know if it can access the hardware acceleration or not, but rotating the desktop cube isn't taxing my CPU much, so I guess it's OK.
After skipping on last upgrade I found some neat new features in Fedora 13. Most notable Kernel Modesetting which replaces the text screens during startup and shutdown by graphic screens. You still get a fleeting glimpse of some text error message here and there, but the overall graphical boot animation works well.
Not all is well though. Connecting to wireless fails sometimes. It shows all available WiFi networks alright, even prompts for WPA keys, but it won't connect to the network after that. So far I have managed to get it work after couple of reboots. Next time it happens I will try changing security settings on my wifi.
I understand the simplicity and elegance of Apple products, from a layperson's point of view. But if you are not one, don't fall prey to the hype. If you have chosen your development platforms wisely (Web design, portable SDK kits), then Linux is the best OS there is for developers. I still might buy Apple laptops, because that hardware is tough to match (esp. keyboard); but for software I always prefer FOSS options. Things might be broken, but it costs nothing and trying to fix it adds to my knowledge. And that's very important for a developer.