A lot of notebook manufacturers are jumping onto the new Intel Core Duo processor. Apple's announcement of the MacBook Pro is no exception and many people seem to have rushed towards the Apple Store to buy one.

I admit it, I almost felt bad considering that I just bought a new Acer Ferrari 4005. However, I had no choice since I had to book in some expenses last year.

I did weep a moment when I stumbled into the announcement of the Acer Travelmate 8200. This is one seriously amazing machine that beats the new Apple at almost everything ... for the same price (or a lot cheaper in Europe).

People that were considering to get the new Intel Apple laptop for multi-boot with Windows should also reconsider. I turns out that it doesn't use the standard PC BIOS, but EFI instead. Only Windows Vista will support EFFI, so your current Windows XP copies are useless. As far as Linux support goes, the Airport Extreme card doesn't work which makes it pretty useless in many settings considering that you can't even dial-up if you don't get an external modem!

I'm also much more confident that OpenSolaris will run soon on it since the Acer Ferrari 4005 seems to have been widely adopted inside Sun and the Travelmate 8200 is a logical follow-up. The chassis is even almost the same.

Maybe a next revision of the MacBook Pro might tempt me, but currently it's again underpowered (this seems to be a trend in Apple notebooks) and doesn't support anything but MacOSX and only a couple of applications correctly.