Sorry, I thought chromium == linux build of chrome? If not, excuse my ignorance!
Anyways, I concur wholeheartedly with the above post, to extremes even. There are countless Linux distros that differ from their parents solely by the default included software, all of which is easily grabbed via the package manager. It's certainly handy to have it preassembled, if the given package list is what you want, but otherwise it seems like a lot of unnecessary clutter.
Why GIMP being included or not in the default Ubuntu install was news at all, for example. Who cares? If it fits, great, if not just grab it after install if you need it.
Software installed by default is a major deal with an OS such as windows, that comes preinstalled on regular systems. Ubuntu doesn't. Sure, there's some niche manufacturers that sell pre-installed Ubuntu systems (and the odd rarely purchased Dell model, now and then), but the *vast* majority of commercial desktop/laptop systems are windows based - obviously excluding Apple.
These users - buying pre-built systems from bigbox retailers - they often have no idea of their options in browsers and other software, so the default install has significant value.
Users installing Ubuntu on end-user systems however are by nature at least sufficiently literate with the system to be aware of their options and to pick the packages they want.
So, yeah... who cares? Why is this even news?
All that said... Chrome on Linux is a much better experience than FF, or at least it was for me a few builds ago, haven't installed the 11.xx ubuntu builds or the later FF/Chrome builds.
Yup. The iPhone 4's camera - particularly with HDR enabled - can take surprisingly great shots in poor lighting. Obviously not competitive with a quality DSLR(and a photographer that knows how to use one) but definitely competitive with a point-and-shoot.
It's possible that this is an extension of precisely that, but I get the feeling people typically buy desktops and laptops like they buy appliances. They know there are a few basic metrics that they don't actually understand, and they go for the [largest/fastest] number of all of them for what they want to spend....... Buying complicated things are simply complicated decisions. Manufacturers are well beyond understanding how people shop, and have figured out how to play that game to their advantage. That's how companies like HP manage to exist in the consumer market, by pumping up the baseline specs and short-changing everything else.
This. I'm the more technically inclined one in my circle, and I constantly rail against people buying laptops or desktops at best buy or what have you, specifically for this reason. Major retailers will sell a computer by 2-3 "stats" often comparing PC's using different stats. Desktop A has a 3.2ghz processor and a 3TB hard drive! Desktop B has 6GB ram and a 27" monitor! And of course the salespeople are always ****ing morons with no idea of what they are selling outside of the gibberish printed on the price tag.
Typically, these prebuilt systems will feature one or two "good" components (read: large number) and be surrounded by a lot of crap creating unnecessary, horrendous bottlenecks in their systems to haul the price down. Unfortunately, most are terribly awkward to upgrade, as the motherboard is virtually always one of the first places the manufacturer skimps out. So, you may have a very fast processor, but it'll never
Take the same budget, go to newegg/ncix/etc and you can put together a far more capable system with components matched to what you're going to use it for and each other.
I'm certainly interested in seeing how this plays out. You're absolutely right, though, that the deathblow would come via sports streaming. As things stand now, live sports is the only Cable product that is extremely difficult to replace.
My only fear is that the Cable industry will succeed in legislating victory over Netflix etc.
Cable is done, it's dead. It's a delivery and pricing model that nobody wants anymore.
Well, that's depressing. Seriously, who would buy something like this? I use my phone (hell, even my laptop) in the tub *all the time* with no problem at all. Keep a hand dry, use your thumb. If you need both hands for whatever you're doing, keep a towel beside the tub. It's really not rocket science.
But, yeah. Laptops and phones in the tub for 6 years now, and I've never had a problem.
Really? I have been trying to compare this recently. I own a Q8300 based machine for my living room, so no anti-intel bigot here, and am looking to replace an aging desktop but can't find any intel stuff that seems to compete at my price point. For comparison I am looking at a phenom 965 black, ~$160. I am planning on spending about $100 on the mobo. So for ~$250 I want the best quad core setup I can get, no matter who makes it. Before you ask, having 4 cores is more important in what I will use them for than having the best single core performance.
* Warning, this post is entirely subjective and anecdotal.
I picked up a BE 965 and have been running it for a while on an ASUS m4a89gtd(USB3). It's overclocked through BIOS on air(though with an inexpensive aftermarket cooler), to 3.8ghz purely by modifying the multiplier, no voltage changes etc; and has remained rock solid there for ~6 months 24/7. It doesn't compete with the high end I7's, but it easily holds it's own against the rest, and does it at a ridiculously low price. If you look into people's results online, 3.8-4ghz is pretty common for these chips, with 4ghz being readily attainable on air with some effort but I'm too lazy for that, the 3.8's good enough for my purposes.
At that price point, it's an incredible value for the performance you get.
While I'm not familiar with this particular processor, in a great many of these lower-power chips you can get significant overclocking gains without noteworthy increased heat. The Pandora, for example, sports an OMAP3530 SoC (which includes an ARM Cortex V8) rated at 600mhz. People have overclocked this to 1ghz with no heat issues and only minor losses in battery life (the chip doesn't remain at maximum speed but underclocks itself when not under load).
It's not like overclocking a normal desktop processor. Instability occurs long before heat becomes an issue.
Errr, why NOT use a phone as an alarm clock? Virtually every smart phone typically needs to be charged daily. If it doesn't need to be, generally people do anyways. Plug it in, let it charge overnight while you're sleeping, alarm wakes you in the morning, ready to go and fully charged.
It's *better* than your average AC alarm clock, as a power failure throughout the night won't interfere with your alarm. The phone's battery keeps you covered. I've been using my cell phones as alarm clocks for, well, as long as cell phones have had alarm clocks. I've never once had a problem with it.
And I've certainly never once considered getting a 'traditional' alarm clock since having a phone that could do the job just fine and, thanks to the magic of custom alarm/ringtones, much less offensively.
Our (Canadian) Pay As You Go mobile phones have that problem. Seriously. Our "minutes" are only good for a month, so if you buy, say, a $30 phone card, you get $30 worth of minutes which expire in 30 days whether you use them or not.
Some carriers were even selling ones that only last 2 weeks.
It's a load of horseshit. I'm fine with metered billing, absolutely fine. So long as I'm billed for exactly what I use, at a reasonable rate. I'd actually prefer that, to be honest - this "monthly cap" thing is stupid.
Mind you, it's just another straw on the back, really. Add to it the fees for "features" that often have nothing to do with the network at all, such as tethering, or things that have been disabled on your device/account for no other reason than to charge you to re-enable them. Or the *mandatory* voice plans to go with your data plan on smartphones.
Seriously, I'd break my contract, pay out the hundreds of dollars required to do so, and never look back if a new cell provider offered me just a simple, no-bullshit billed-by-use, say, $5/gb. No voice plan at all. No "features". Just a wireless data connection for my handheld portable computer(smartphone).
Completion of a game isn't a sales factor. I don't *want* a game that I can complete. I want an infinite, sprawling, unpredictable game that keeps me interested for years with new things all the time.
This is a very good point. While I love a good story, and a story needs an ending, I *really* enjoy games I can play on and on for a long time without just wallowing in endless repetition.
A problem many games face these days, since the addition of achievements, is the addition of many inane tasks that it's easy to get "sucked into" doing, particularly in the RPG-esque games. This is aggravated when these silly achievement acts affect your character beyond just getting an achievement notification - you tend to work harder to get them all done.
What happens, for me at any rate, is that I start trying to get all these little side achievements done, and then grow bored with the now-repetitive and tedious gameplay, lose interest and move on. The difference. This is the bad kind of unfinished game.
On the other hand, we have games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, etc. I've never finished any of them. I deliberately don't. I keep adding mods, developing the game. I get started on the main quests sometimes, but as a rule of thumb I never finish them. This way, I can play the game - enjoying the vast amount of side content - for a long, long time. When I get bored, I can put the game away, knowing that I can come back to it excited. After all, it's a game I haven't finished! Reinstall, start a new game, get right back to it. When I've finished games, it dramatically reduces the replay value for me.
As the poster I quoted noted at the end of his post, whether or not I finish a game is not directly related to the quality of the game, or how much I liked it. Just the type of game.
[tinfoilhat] The REAL reason Apple removed this from the App Store? You can use it to install Windows 3.1 or even... Windows95!
Who needs Windows 7 Phone when you can rock Windows 3.1 on your iPhone?! [/tinfoilhat]
Seriously, though, this is fantastic. There's a lot of fantastic old DOS games, it's great to add to your emulator collection. Add OpenPandora's iControlPad for proper, physical gaming controls, and Zodttd's excellent emulator collection, and you can turn an iPhone into an amazing gaming machine.
Of course, I could just be a freak who enjoys using ridiculously expensive modern hardware to play old games.
Already outdated? It's not that shabby. Clocks up to 1ghz or so without voiding warranty, max ~64gb of storage space, touchscreen, full keyboard, gaming nubs, etc.
It's generally more powerful than an iPad, fits in your pocket, running a properly open Linux distro - angstrom w/ XFCE (and people have gotten Ubuntu and Debian running on it too).
I've been watching the development for quite a while now, and things seem to be well coming to a head. Realistically still a few more months to go for new orders, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
Wikipedia needs to have a section in it's articles to show other viewpoints/opinions, particularly for more controversial articles. Well, when they can be properly supported, not just any random asshat's opinion mind you. This would go a long ways to calming the ridiculous edit wars, and give people a more well rounded look at the subject matter.
Hell, I've had my iPhone fall off the roof of my car; dropped it in the bathtub(Movies+Bathtub=win!) once and had it sit in a half-full mug of coffee overnight.
It's screen had a small chip on the edge from the fall off the car, and I had to open it and clean it out after the coffee incident, but it still works just fine.. though it still smells faintly of coffee.
More on-topic; it actually has replaced pretty much everything listing in the OP for me, too. Except, perhaps, gaming: I'm getting depressingly old, and just can't get into accelerometer controlled gaming. Touch screens are awesome for basic computing/phone use, but terrible for games: Your fingers obstruct view of the screen. I'm thinking of putting together an Arduino based interface for a keyboard; followed by an SNES controller. After that; it's all gravy.
Not that watches are bad! I'm a big fan of wristwatches, though since my last one broke, I've not really had much of a need to replace it. Eventually I will, but my phone does fine as it is.
Regardless, the evolution of the smartphone/MID is going to have extensive impacts on other gadgets, without a doubt. We're already getting to the point where the "phone" part is secondary to everything else, and that's the direction I think manufacturers should be moving in now. You can't really improve a phone any more; it's a simple device by nature.
Instead of thinking "Hey, what else can we cram into this phone", I think a better approach is "What other capabilities can we add to this highly mobile(re: pocket sized) computer."
Of course, I hate phones. I have only the cheapest possible voice plan for my iPhone, and I only have that for emergencies. I'm just looking for a better option. I find it somewhat amusing that my phone has replaced all these other devices, and the only one in the list that it hasn't really replaced... is a phone. Simply because I neither had nor wanted one.
Depends on how much you value your time. My time is worth more to me than trying to fiddle with an underpowered secondhand PC. If you're just tinkering that's one thing, but vintage hardware is going to disappoint for any "real" use.
And it depends how much you enjoy monkeying with that old PC. If you have fun getting your lil web server or what have you up and running, then it's time well spent. If you don't enjoy doing it... then yeah, you're absolutely right.
You can with a 3yr contract. You can get a brand new 3G here for 99, or a refurbished one for 49 - and that's regular pricing. You can pick up 3GS's from private owners, take over their contracts for that no problem, or pick up a refurbished one if you get lucky pretty cheap.
Thinking that you're safe running OSX is very foolish. It IS more secure than Windows, but it can get viruses too. As OSX increases in market share, you will find more viruses appearing for it too. It'll take a little longer to get started - Everyone got great Intro Virus Production 101 classes in grossly insecure older versions of Windows, after all.
OS X is indeed a more secure operating system, but it is not an invincible one. Assuming you are and will always be safe because you're running it is a very bad idea.
I've used a notebook as my primary computer for years. It still handles the newest games just fine; DMC4, Crysis, etc all play with settings on high at 1680x1050 beautifully. Even in regards to gaming, you can be using comparatively old hardware and still get excellent results if you use GOOD old hardware. It's not like the "old days" where a computer was worthless after 3 years.
The reality is that these days the majority of computer users absolutely do not need a high powered system. My wife, for example, runs an old dell notebook, a 1.2ghz dual core amd of some description, with 2gb ram. It'll outperform an Atom, but not by a large margin. She doesn't have the slightest problem with performance. She certainly can't game on it, but it does everything else she needs to do: Largely, web based stuff, non-HD video, etc.
Most households have multiple computers these days too - particularly if you count smartphones. There's really only a need for one more powerful system for the odd time you need to actually do something that really requires the horsepower.
I'm always on the go. I got my notebook specifically to be mobile with my computing. But really? As a 17" notebook at 8 lbs, it's "portable"... but I never take it anywhere. Packing up it's huge power brick and lugging around the bag, coupled with the awareness that it's still a very expensive machine make it unpleasant to actually travel with. I never, ever game "on the go"
I'm looking to pick up a Netbook. The lions share of computer use I do - virtually ALL the computer use I do outside of gaming - is easily handled by one. Further, they are small enough to be stuffed into any random bag, and cheap enough to be moved around freely, without undue concern. If I bang up a $300 notebook, it's not going to hit my like damaging a $2500 notebook. Their batteries (when you get 6 and 9 cell variants at least) power them many times longer than my notebook will run even without doing anything strenuous.
Why wouldn't you go Netbook for portable computing?
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Sorry, I thought chromium == linux build of chrome? If not, excuse my ignorance!
Anyways, I concur wholeheartedly with the above post, to extremes even. There are countless Linux distros that differ from their parents solely by the default included software, all of which is easily grabbed via the package manager. It's certainly handy to have it preassembled, if the given package list is what you want, but otherwise it seems like a lot of unnecessary clutter.
Why GIMP being included or not in the default Ubuntu install was news at all, for example. Who cares? If it fits, great, if not just grab it after install if you need it.
Software installed by default is a major deal with an OS such as windows, that comes preinstalled on regular systems. Ubuntu doesn't. Sure, there's some niche manufacturers that sell pre-installed Ubuntu systems (and the odd rarely purchased Dell model, now and then), but the *vast* majority of commercial desktop/laptop systems are windows based - obviously excluding Apple.
These users - buying pre-built systems from bigbox retailers - they often have no idea of their options in browsers and other software, so the default install has significant value.
Users installing Ubuntu on end-user systems however are by nature at least sufficiently literate with the system to be aware of their options and to pick the packages they want.
So, yeah... who cares? Why is this even news?
All that said... Chrome on Linux is a much better experience than FF, or at least it was for me a few builds ago, haven't installed the 11.xx ubuntu builds or the later FF/Chrome builds.
Yup. The iPhone 4's camera - particularly with HDR enabled - can take surprisingly great shots in poor lighting. Obviously not competitive with a quality DSLR(and a photographer that knows how to use one) but definitely competitive with a point-and-shoot.
It's possible that this is an extension of precisely that, but I get the feeling people typically buy desktops and laptops like they buy appliances. They know there are a few basic metrics that they don't actually understand, and they go for the [largest/fastest] number of all of them for what they want to spend. ... ...
Buying complicated things are simply complicated decisions. Manufacturers are well beyond understanding how people shop, and have figured out how to play that game to their advantage. That's how companies like HP manage to exist in the consumer market, by pumping up the baseline specs and short-changing everything else.
This. I'm the more technically inclined one in my circle, and I constantly rail against people buying laptops or desktops at best buy or what have you, specifically for this reason. Major retailers will sell a computer by 2-3 "stats" often comparing PC's using different stats. Desktop A has a 3.2ghz processor and a 3TB hard drive! Desktop B has 6GB ram and a 27" monitor! And of course the salespeople are always ****ing morons with no idea of what they are selling outside of the gibberish printed on the price tag.
Typically, these prebuilt systems will feature one or two "good" components (read: large number) and be surrounded by a lot of crap creating unnecessary, horrendous bottlenecks in their systems to haul the price down. Unfortunately, most are terribly awkward to upgrade, as the motherboard is virtually always one of the first places the manufacturer skimps out. So, you may have a very fast processor, but it'll never
Take the same budget, go to newegg/ncix/etc and you can put together a far more capable system with components matched to what you're going to use it for and each other.
I'm certainly interested in seeing how this plays out. You're absolutely right, though, that the deathblow would come via sports streaming. As things stand now, live sports is the only Cable product that is extremely difficult to replace.
My only fear is that the Cable industry will succeed in legislating victory over Netflix etc.
Cable is done, it's dead. It's a delivery and pricing model that nobody wants anymore.
Well, that's depressing. Seriously, who would buy something like this? I use my phone (hell, even my laptop) in the tub *all the time* with no problem at all. Keep a hand dry, use your thumb. If you need both hands for whatever you're doing, keep a towel beside the tub. It's really not rocket science.
But, yeah. Laptops and phones in the tub for 6 years now, and I've never had a problem.
Really?
I have been trying to compare this recently. I own a Q8300 based machine for my living room, so no anti-intel bigot here, and am looking to replace an aging desktop but can't find any intel stuff that seems to compete at my price point. For comparison I am looking at a phenom 965 black, ~$160. I am planning on spending about $100 on the mobo. So for ~$250 I want the best quad core setup I can get, no matter who makes it. Before you ask, having 4 cores is more important in what I will use them for than having the best single core performance.
* Warning, this post is entirely subjective and anecdotal.
I picked up a BE 965 and have been running it for a while on an ASUS m4a89gtd(USB3). It's overclocked through BIOS on air(though with an inexpensive aftermarket cooler), to 3.8ghz purely by modifying the multiplier, no voltage changes etc; and has remained rock solid there for ~6 months 24/7. It doesn't compete with the high end I7's, but it easily holds it's own against the rest, and does it at a ridiculously low price. If you look into people's results online, 3.8-4ghz is pretty common for these chips, with 4ghz being readily attainable on air with some effort but I'm too lazy for that, the 3.8's good enough for my purposes.
At that price point, it's an incredible value for the performance you get.
While I'm not familiar with this particular processor, in a great many of these lower-power chips you can get significant overclocking gains without noteworthy increased heat. The Pandora, for example, sports an OMAP3530 SoC (which includes an ARM Cortex V8) rated at 600mhz. People have overclocked this to 1ghz with no heat issues and only minor losses in battery life (the chip doesn't remain at maximum speed but underclocks itself when not under load).
It's not like overclocking a normal desktop processor. Instability occurs long before heat becomes an issue.
Errr, why NOT use a phone as an alarm clock? Virtually every smart phone typically needs to be charged daily. If it doesn't need to be, generally people do anyways. Plug it in, let it charge overnight while you're sleeping, alarm wakes you in the morning, ready to go and fully charged.
It's *better* than your average AC alarm clock, as a power failure throughout the night won't interfere with your alarm. The phone's battery keeps you covered. I've been using my cell phones as alarm clocks for, well, as long as cell phones have had alarm clocks. I've never once had a problem with it.
And I've certainly never once considered getting a 'traditional' alarm clock since having a phone that could do the job just fine and, thanks to the magic of custom alarm/ringtones, much less offensively.
Our (Canadian) Pay As You Go mobile phones have that problem. Seriously. Our "minutes" are only good for a month, so if you buy, say, a $30 phone card, you get $30 worth of minutes which expire in 30 days whether you use them or not.
Some carriers were even selling ones that only last 2 weeks.
It's a load of horseshit. I'm fine with metered billing, absolutely fine. So long as I'm billed for exactly what I use, at a reasonable rate. I'd actually prefer that, to be honest - this "monthly cap" thing is stupid.
Mind you, it's just another straw on the back, really. Add to it the fees for "features" that often have nothing to do with the network at all, such as tethering, or things that have been disabled on your device/account for no other reason than to charge you to re-enable them. Or the *mandatory* voice plans to go with your data plan on smartphones.
Seriously, I'd break my contract, pay out the hundreds of dollars required to do so, and never look back if a new cell provider offered me just a simple, no-bullshit billed-by-use, say, $5/gb. No voice plan at all. No "features". Just a wireless data connection for my handheld portable computer(smartphone).
Completion of a game isn't a sales factor. I don't *want* a game that I can complete. I want an infinite, sprawling, unpredictable game that keeps me interested for years with new things all the time.
This is a very good point. While I love a good story, and a story needs an ending, I *really* enjoy games I can play on and on for a long time without just wallowing in endless repetition.
A problem many games face these days, since the addition of achievements, is the addition of many inane tasks that it's easy to get "sucked into" doing, particularly in the RPG-esque games. This is aggravated when these silly achievement acts affect your character beyond just getting an achievement notification - you tend to work harder to get them all done.
What happens, for me at any rate, is that I start trying to get all these little side achievements done, and then grow bored with the now-repetitive and tedious gameplay, lose interest and move on. The difference. This is the bad kind of unfinished game.
On the other hand, we have games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, etc. I've never finished any of them. I deliberately don't. I keep adding mods, developing the game. I get started on the main quests sometimes, but as a rule of thumb I never finish them. This way, I can play the game - enjoying the vast amount of side content - for a long, long time. When I get bored, I can put the game away, knowing that I can come back to it excited. After all, it's a game I haven't finished! Reinstall, start a new game, get right back to it. When I've finished games, it dramatically reduces the replay value for me.
As the poster I quoted noted at the end of his post, whether or not I finish a game is not directly related to the quality of the game, or how much I liked it. Just the type of game.
You can still download this by adding the authors' cydia repo: http://www.litchie.net/cydia
[tinfoilhat]
The REAL reason Apple removed this from the App Store? You can use it to install Windows 3.1 or even... Windows95!
Who needs Windows 7 Phone when you can rock Windows 3.1 on your iPhone?!
[/tinfoilhat]
Seriously, though, this is fantastic. There's a lot of fantastic old DOS games, it's great to add to your emulator collection. Add OpenPandora's iControlPad for proper, physical gaming controls, and Zodttd's excellent emulator collection, and you can turn an iPhone into an amazing gaming machine.
Of course, I could just be a freak who enjoys using ridiculously expensive modern hardware to play old games.
Already outdated? It's not that shabby. Clocks up to 1ghz or so without voiding warranty, max ~64gb of storage space, touchscreen, full keyboard, gaming nubs, etc.
It's generally more powerful than an iPad, fits in your pocket, running a properly open Linux distro - angstrom w/ XFCE (and people have gotten Ubuntu and Debian running on it too).
I've been watching the development for quite a while now, and things seem to be well coming to a head. Realistically still a few more months to go for new orders, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
Wikipedia needs to have a section in it's articles to show other viewpoints/opinions, particularly for more controversial articles. Well, when they can be properly supported, not just any random asshat's opinion mind you. This would go a long ways to calming the ridiculous edit wars, and give people a more well rounded look at the subject matter.
Hell, I've had my iPhone fall off the roof of my car; dropped it in the bathtub(Movies+Bathtub=win!) once and had it sit in a half-full mug of coffee overnight.
It's screen had a small chip on the edge from the fall off the car, and I had to open it and clean it out after the coffee incident, but it still works just fine.. though it still smells faintly of coffee.
More on-topic; it actually has replaced pretty much everything listing in the OP for me, too. Except, perhaps, gaming: I'm getting depressingly old, and just can't get into accelerometer controlled gaming. Touch screens are awesome for basic computing/phone use, but terrible for games: Your fingers obstruct view of the screen. I'm thinking of putting together an Arduino based interface for a keyboard; followed by an SNES controller. After that; it's all gravy.
Not that watches are bad! I'm a big fan of wristwatches, though since my last one broke, I've not really had much of a need to replace it. Eventually I will, but my phone does fine as it is.
Regardless, the evolution of the smartphone/MID is going to have extensive impacts on other gadgets, without a doubt. We're already getting to the point where the "phone" part is secondary to everything else, and that's the direction I think manufacturers should be moving in now. You can't really improve a phone any more; it's a simple device by nature.
Instead of thinking "Hey, what else can we cram into this phone", I think a better approach is "What other capabilities can we add to this highly mobile(re: pocket sized) computer."
Of course, I hate phones. I have only the cheapest possible voice plan for my iPhone, and I only have that for emergencies. I'm just looking for a better option. I find it somewhat amusing that my phone has replaced all these other devices, and the only one in the list that it hasn't really replaced... is a phone. Simply because I neither had nor wanted one.
Depends on how much you value your time. My time is worth more to me than trying to fiddle with an underpowered secondhand PC. If you're just tinkering that's one thing, but vintage hardware is going to disappoint for any "real" use.
And it depends how much you enjoy monkeying with that old PC. If you have fun getting your lil web server or what have you up and running, then it's time well spent. If you don't enjoy doing it... then yeah, you're absolutely right.
You can with a 3yr contract. You can get a brand new 3G here for 99, or a refurbished one for 49 - and that's regular pricing. You can pick up 3GS's from private owners, take over their contracts for that no problem, or pick up a refurbished one if you get lucky pretty cheap.
Thinking that you're safe running OSX is very foolish. It IS more secure than Windows, but it can get viruses too. As OSX increases in market share, you will find more viruses appearing for it too. It'll take a little longer to get started - Everyone got great Intro Virus Production 101 classes in grossly insecure older versions of Windows, after all. OS X is indeed a more secure operating system, but it is not an invincible one. Assuming you are and will always be safe because you're running it is a very bad idea.
I've used a notebook as my primary computer for years. It still handles the newest games just fine; DMC4, Crysis, etc all play with settings on high at 1680x1050 beautifully. Even in regards to gaming, you can be using comparatively old hardware and still get excellent results if you use GOOD old hardware. It's not like the "old days" where a computer was worthless after 3 years. The reality is that these days the majority of computer users absolutely do not need a high powered system. My wife, for example, runs an old dell notebook, a 1.2ghz dual core amd of some description, with 2gb ram. It'll outperform an Atom, but not by a large margin. She doesn't have the slightest problem with performance. She certainly can't game on it, but it does everything else she needs to do: Largely, web based stuff, non-HD video, etc. Most households have multiple computers these days too - particularly if you count smartphones. There's really only a need for one more powerful system for the odd time you need to actually do something that really requires the horsepower. I'm always on the go. I got my notebook specifically to be mobile with my computing. But really? As a 17" notebook at 8 lbs, it's "portable"... but I never take it anywhere. Packing up it's huge power brick and lugging around the bag, coupled with the awareness that it's still a very expensive machine make it unpleasant to actually travel with. I never, ever game "on the go" I'm looking to pick up a Netbook. The lions share of computer use I do - virtually ALL the computer use I do outside of gaming - is easily handled by one. Further, they are small enough to be stuffed into any random bag, and cheap enough to be moved around freely, without undue concern. If I bang up a $300 notebook, it's not going to hit my like damaging a $2500 notebook. Their batteries (when you get 6 and 9 cell variants at least) power them many times longer than my notebook will run even without doing anything strenuous. Why wouldn't you go Netbook for portable computing?