Similar to Andy’s experience, when I first saw the MacBooks I was drawn to the black one and over the next few months it kept gnawing away at me that I really, really wanted one.

I’d done plenty of rationalisations that ranged from being happy to carry on with my Dell (that I bought when I couldn’t justify the 15" PowerBook a while back) to deciding that a 15" MacBook Pro would be the machine to take me to creative Nirvana.

I found frequent excuses to visit various Apple dealers and spent rather a lot of time researching Intel Macs on-line; tried the keyboards; felt for hot spots on the cases; and so on. All along the BlackBook continued to hijack my attention.

Eventually the MacBook convinced me that I didn’t need a glow-in-the-dark keyboard or a dedicated GPU so I made my mind up that I was going to have a black MacBook but I’d wait until they started shipping with Core 2 Duo…

Then I the scouring of the Internet started; searching for clues as to when the Merom-based machines would hit the market. It became the best part of an obsession. I narrowed it down to the beginning of September. Apple released the new iMacs but no sign of anything portable with a 64-bit CPU. And I broke. Now I’m broke. I’ve bought a BlackBook with 2GB RAM and I love it. (Actually, it’s my second black Mac – the first had a nasty great dead pixel right in the middle of the screen and was, thankfully, replaced by the dealer the very next day – phew, thank you guys!)

I’ve installed Parallels and can fire up Windows XP when I need to do some Selector work and it all works fabulously. In fact Parallels runs Windows faster than my 2GHz Dell does.

I’m now a contented wee full-time Mac user and C doesn’t have me interfering with her iBook anymore when she’s not looking. Splendid.