We’ve had Vonage for almost 5 years now and have never been disappointed… far better than Verizon’s POTS lines ever were in the Washington DC metro suburbs. I cannot say enough how thrilled we are with it.

Have to agree about Vonage. Half the time I tried to place a call, it disconnected as frequently as my cell phone in the apartment my wife used to be in. I’m actually back to POTS for one plain reason. It works when there is no power, and no battery is needed for the power.

Last week I picked up a 2.13Ghz SSD MacBook Air to use at work or while traveling because I was finding a 15″ 2.86Ghz MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM too bulky to carry around regularly. One my my biggest worries would be that the Air would be unusable because of the slower processor speed and limit to 2GB of RAM however I picked up the Pro mainly because it was the most powerful laptop Apple offered last fall, without considering what I would be using it for.

I’m happy to say I’m quite happy with the performance so far. Snow Leopard runs like a champ, and I haven’t noticed any difference with any of the standard Office applications. The few movies from iTunes that I loaded on it play fine and there have been no issues with a small iTunes music library. I haven’t tried loading Call of Duty 4 or playing a 780p movie, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I see some performance hit with graphic intensive applications. XP would probably run fine under VMWare, but I’m hesitating loading Windows 7 due to the lack of drive space and internal DVD player.

I firmly believe that the advances of the next ten years are going to be in energy efficiency, battery life, and SSD storage. Processor speed has pretty much reached the point of diminshing returns, and any advances are going to have to come from low-power, low-heat, high performing processors. There certainly is going to continue to be a market for high-performance workstations, but the benefits that the average user gets from them are going to slowly dwindle as the portable market matures and becomes the primary focus of Apple’s pile of development cash.

In a sense, high processor speed is a copout. By which I mean that even the cheapest computers on the market are incredibly fast and and powerful in comparison with those of, say, a decade ago, and this has allowed software developers to slide by putting out badly written products. Take my own personal workhorse, Dreamweaver. It was such a piece of bloatware that it could barely run on a G-3 Mac. So I begged, wheedled, and ranted until I browbeat my boss into giving me a G-4. On that, it sorta ran and I could get some serious work done. It ran well enough on a G-5 and runs very well indeed on my current Intel Mac Pro. But all the improvement came from processor speed and increased RAM, at no time has Macromedia or Adobe bothered to clean up Dreamweaver’s copde. The brute force of modern computers has provided them with the perfect excuse to stick with what they’ve got. Probably the same is true for a lot of other programs as well, such as the Office suite. Now imagine the speed improvement we’d get if software developers could be induced to clean up their act. If we want a faster and better computing experience than we have now, maybe we should demand leaner and meaner software rather than always throwing our money at hardware.