What an odd way to decide which machine you'll use every day for the next year or more.
A clean install is really easy -- maybe one hour if you sit and watch it, fifteen minutes if you use your old laptop while it's going... why would you let a cost of <one hour drive your buying decision?
Setup time is part of the cost of a system. I'm sure that the apple machine isn't actually ready for you to use it out of the box -- if you're like most HN readers you'll have tons of tweaks you need to install before the computer actually works the way you want it to.
I'm writing this on a x220 with a 240GB Vertex3 under the hood, which is 4-10x faster than my coworker's13" 240GB macbook air for bioinformatics workloads. It cost about $100 more, and yes it required a clean install as part of setup.
The profit I've made on that $100 + 1 hour is insane... probably 100x return so far this year on decreased compile & run times (calculated as delta in experiments per day times my annual salary)
A clean install is really easy -- maybe one hour if you sit and watch it, fifteen minutes if you use your old laptop while it's going... why would you let a cost of <one hour drive your buying decision?
Setup time is part of the cost of a system. I'm sure that the apple machine isn't actually ready for you to use it out of the box -- if you're like most HN readers you'll have tons of tweaks you need to install before the computer actually works the way you want it to.
I'm writing this on a x220 with a 240GB Vertex3 under the hood, which is 4-10x faster than my coworker's13" 240GB macbook air for bioinformatics workloads. It cost about $100 more, and yes it required a clean install as part of setup.
The profit I've made on that $100 + 1 hour is insane... probably 100x return so far this year on decreased compile & run times (calculated as delta in experiments per day times my annual salary)