This week I was at the International PHP Conference. It was a nice conference with interesting topics. It was however a bit of a pity that the PHP conference got 'cornered' by the Webinale conference, which was a lot bigger and caused the PHP sessions to be in way too small rooms. But most of the sessions I visited were interesting, so all in all it was a nice conference.

There was one particular thing I noticed though: the amount of people using macbooks. I know that it's a popular notebook, but almost half of the laptops there was a mac!

See picture:

4 of the visible laptops are macbooks, and there were even more not directly visible on this picture.

Maybe my own laptop got scared of this, because it decided to die during the second day of the conference. It's probably a motherboard failure and repair will be expensive, so I'm thinking of buying a replacement.

Now I'm stuck with a dilemma. Should I buy a macbook?

Regardless of it's Cool Factor, what makes a macbook useful for PHP developers? What are features that are good, what are features that are hard to get used to for a developer switching to mac? Any ideas?

One thing I will miss if I buy a mac is the ability to write on it; I had a tablet pc and since I got it, all my notes were digital. So the alternative is a new tablet.

Tough choice!

(If you're curious, the picture was taken during Stephan Schmidt and Frank Kleine's talk on Annotations. Interesting presentations, although I have my doubts abusing the docblocks for declarations)