In a moment of weakness, and just before the great upgrade for Mac laptops in October, I bought a 24″ IMac for my home workstation and an “old” cinema display to replace the Dell display I was using in our lab for the laptop. If I had to do it all over again… I would have waited two days (!) and possibly gotten an upgraded Mac laptop Pro, and one or two of the “new” cinema displays, and just moved the laptop between the two desks. As it is, I spend a fair amount of time worrying whether the laptop and IMac are synchronized and have to buy two copies of mac applications, IWork and Parallels. The new cinema displays include an iSight camera and are designed to integrate with the new laptops. 

For syncing eMail, I use the Mac Mail client and configure the accounts as IMAP accounts on my mail server.

For syncing files, I’ve subscribed to the Mac.Me service, ($99/year) and use IDisk. This works as well as an FTP server to my own FTP site; and the .me service will also synchronize ICal and the address book. Calendar entries are put in Google Calendar, which is then synched to the two ICal applications.

It all seems a little complicated and kludgy. But the upshot is by using my mail server, and Google calendar, I can always go to the web to see my eMail and appointments. Despite the uproar when Mac.me was introduced in the summer, so far it seems to work fine for what I need. 

I also took the opportunity to buy Adobe Creative Suite. They sent CS3, and of course, they have just released CS4. I’m not able to figure whether I’ll be able to upgrade to CS4 without paying. Lots of problems here, worth another discussion.