Apple in a Cisco world

I'm a network engineer by trade and one of the things that I absolutely must have in a laptop is console access. This isn't a big deal aside from it being difficult to find a laptop with a serial port anymore. IOGear makes a very nice USB to Serial dongle that I've been happy with. I prefer Putty also, and there's a serial port shim for it called wcons.d.

Ok, so that's great and all, but what else must I have in a laptop. Unfortunately I must have Visio. Yep...has to be MS Visio too. That's a real bummer when it comes to Apple because MS hasn't released Visio for OS X. I doubt they ever will. So for diagram type applications I'm left with Omnigraffle. Omnigraffle is a pretty sweet product but it has one big flaw. It can only import Visio XML files.

So, please someone....ask someone at MS to port Visio. If I had Visio I'd get a Powerbook in a heartbeat. Hmm...maybe you don't want to mention that to the MS folks.

Why's that such a big deal? OS X is a great OS. Plus, the laptops are sweet! GE on the 15" Powerbook! OS X would allow me to do all of the things I have to do in Linux in a VirtualPC machine now. TFTP server, FTP server, Apache...all available in OS X very easily, if I want.

Oh for Visio...