I’ve been holding out on new traditional home computing gear (e.g. laptop or desktop) since I really haven’t had a good need, despite my lust for the finer things. I’ve even gone so far as to jack-up the hard drives in Ye Olde MacBook to good effect. Such good effect that it could easily be my primary personal laptop for at least another year and a half. I mean really, if MS Office 2011 runs decently on this old kit, what more can you ask for?
Except for that pesky desire to run virtual machines. I picked up a copy of Parallels Desktop in a recent MacUpdate promotion. Then I wanted to start kicking around some Hadoop virtual machines from vendors like Cloudera and Hortonworks. Guess what? You really need a free and clear 4GB of RAM to get started with these vms. My poor old machine only has 4GB total.
So Ye Olde MacBook is fine for the standard Ubuntu or CentOS distro, but the heavy duty data sciency type stuff is probably beyond it’s meager capabilities.
Something to chew on.