Hesitant about switching

Hello,

I've been doing research about buying a Mac to learn Cocoa/Objective-C I'm looking into the 13 inch range for portability. Right now I use a Netbook for C# development (long, unnecessary story) and I'm quite happy with it. Seeing as current Macs are Windows capable, I don't have any quarrels about putting all of my eggs in one basket; so to speak.

My main concerns are: Portability, power vs battery life, and development capabilities.

Does anyone have any insight into this?

Thank you

Any mac you can buy is Portable! The iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 Aluminum are the smallest models (other than the MacBook Air). Battery life has quite a range from 2 hours to 7 hours on a good battery depending on the model computer you buy. You'll love the mac!

It's just as portable as any other 13" laptop.

The 13" MBP will get 7 hours and the 13" MB will get you 5 hours on battery according to Apple. This depends on usage though.

If you're looking to learn Cocoa, you are limited in your options . Ruby, Perl and Python are all installed by default. I can't speak for the versions of Ruby and Perl but Leopard comes with Python 2.5.1 by default. If you develop with Python, you'll probably want to update that.

Compatibility really isn't an issue. Macs use commodity x86 hardware. If you find that you don't like it, you can always pop in a Windows or a Linux disc and install the OS of your choice and have a very pretty PC.