After a long and fruitful life, my laptop is dying. It served me well, but its time has passed and I'm looking to buy something new. Apple's laptops look dead sexy, but I haven't used a Mac in about 10 years and I'm unsure.

Before I plunk down $2-3000 for a new laptop, I'd like to hear what everyone else's experiences have been. Is development on the Mac as easy as it is with a standard Unix box? Are you able to use standard BSD perl modules off of CPAN? Has that changed with the new Intel Macs? Are there hidden pitfalls I should know about? Is it still simply a matter of vi/emacs or are there cool dev tools for perl available for the Mac? And finally, is it really worth it? Or am I better off just buying a Dell and installing Linux/BSD?

Finally, for anyone who actually works at Apple, is there a perl community over there?

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