What’s new on my iPod:
Britta Phillips & Dean Wareham – L’Avventura
Junior Senior – D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat
Michael Franti & Spearhead – Everyone Deserves Music
Stars – Heart
Zero 7 – Simple Things
What should be my iPod:
Stew – Something Deeper Than These Changes
I woke up this morning not to the sound of someone making me a cup of tea in the kitchen but instead the new Junior Senior video being blasted on the iMacs’ sad little speakers. Megan just kept repeating it over and over and over. Finally I made it up myself and offered to buy her the album today so we could at least listen to it on the stereo and in the car. Of course this begs the question as to why I still can’t play MP3/AAC through the stereo but that’s another blog. Anyways, Megan takes off for a run and I get to return to my tea.
Now I’m sitting in the kitchen trying to think how and when I’m going to make it to Sonic Boom to buy this album when the epiphany hits me, iTunes! Flip the PowerBook open, click on Music Store, search for Junior Senior, press Buy Album (I had already signed up for the iTunes store) and not 6 minutes later I had the entire album on my computer. 5 minutes later there were two albums sitting on my kitchen table. Too smooth, too cool and way way way too easy. Just now I’m thinking about all these other albums I want and can’t help but start searching the iTunes site. Thankfully I keep reminding myself that I do have a credit card attached to this account. Now where’s that old ThinkPad, I think I’ve got my new living room music computer…
In deciding to make the switch I had to figure out just what kind of need I was going to fulfill. I’ve got an amazing home built PC at the moment, an Athlon 2200XP machine with 1GB of RAM, a flat screen monitor, 120GB of RAID 0+1 storage, etc. It’s as fast as I could want, boots in under 40 seconds and hasn’t crashed since I built it. It’s not going to be replaced for quite some time. But what about my laptop?
Sitting in the living is my old dog Thinkpad 600X. It’s only 4 years old but in the world of PC laptops that’s a lifetime. With 384MB of RAM, a 1024×768 screen and only 10GB of hard disk space it takes it almost 4 minutes to boot Windows XP and couldn’t do any sort of compilation for my work projects. Not that this isn’t a great machine for email, web browsing and VPN’ing into a remote desktop but for software development, it’s dead. This means what I’ll be replacing is the laptop.
In looking at Apple’s web site I discovered that their laptops were somewhat dated. Most used PC100 or PC133 RAM which was at least 3 years old technology. DDR 400 was all therage and even the lowest end PC laptops had DDR266. In addition faster 5200RPM hard drives and fatty video cards should be offered. Besides software I’m going to want to play some games. Further their chips also appeared to be getting long in the tooth as well, the G4 being just a slightly juiced up G3. 800Mhz CPU speeds were the highest available except for the new 17″ that was coming out at 1Ghz but the 17″ is too big to fit in my bag, which brings us to weight. Most the iBooks and PowerBooks were of decent weight, 5-7 pounds, with the 15″ Titanium being perfect at 5.1lbs. But still it didn’t feel right, the machines just didn’t have the features for the price they asked. What to do but read the Mac rumor forums and see if anyone has an idea what’s coming down the road? This is where the Apple world shines.
The Mac has got to have the most loyal, dedicated followers on the planet akin to hard core religious zealots. Rumor forums abound as do hundreds of informative blogs about everything Mac under the sun. Sure enough 5 or 6 confirmed the fact that a new version of the 15″ PowerBook would be coming out with a host of updates to bring it in line with the 17″. I decided to wait out the summer to see what would happen and, low and behold, the new aluminum PowerBook 15″ G4 arrrived. Reading through the specs I was satisifed with everything I saw with the exception of a slightly faster chip and a higher resolution screen. 1.25Ghz is good but 1.5Ghz would have been better. Also the 1280×854 screen is adequate for my work but a 1400×1024 screen like you’re going to get in a similarly configured Dell laptop would have been better. Nevertheless, I was hooked, this would be my new machine.
A trip to the local Apple store revealed that you cannot customize PowerBook configurations for those bought at a brick and mortar Apple store so online I went. The base machine I built started with the higher end 15″ PowerBook. I removed the SuperDrive as I have no idea when I might use it, increase the hard drive speed to the 80GB 5200RPM and added an extra power supply for my office. A blue tooth mouse almost made it onto the list but I wanted to make sure I liked this idea of a single button first. That was it, I added it to my shopping basket and hit checkout To my surprise I found that I qualified for a 6 months same as cash Apple loan. 2 minutes later I was approved, checked out and patiently waiting for my new machine. Being a custom order it turns out you have to wait one week longer as the machines ships from the manufacturer in Taiwan. But don’t good things come to those who wait?
Why would I ever want to switch from Windows to the Mac? I’ve been using PCs since DOS 3.0 and Windows 2.1, for roughly 14 years now, and never have used a Mac for more than a few minutes at a computer store or a friend’s house. All my graphic designer friends swear by them but not me, I’ve always been a hard core PC hacker, a developer who loved the fact that Microsoft treated me like a king so I would write tools for their platform. As a developer I’ve always had access to phenomenal tools from Microsoft and other 3rd parties that made writing Windows apps easy, maybe not interesting, but easy. Not that this isn’t the case for the Mac but all I ever heard from my friends who developed for the Mac was that the tools were never as good as Microsofts’, that Apple didn’t treat their developers nearly as well as Microsoft, that Apple’s APIs were not aging very well and that Apple did a terrible job of providing backwards compatibility as they moved their hardware and software forward. That was always one of the key strong points of Microsoft, backwards compatibility. They even made Dave Cutler ensure that there would be an x86 layer inside the NT kernel such that legacy DOS applications could be run. That in addition to the fact that the NT APIs had to be a superset of the Windows API, ensuring that old programs would still compile and run under NT. From what I heard Apple never did that. I’m sure it cost Microsoft tons and we benefited, the developers, and we stayed and made it a great platform. But now these times they are a changing.
I’m working for BEA Systems now and am working in Java. My work desktop is a Windows machine but, in theory, the application I work on should run on any pre-emptive multi-tasking OS that has the latest Java Virtual Machine. So why not a Mac with OS X, their beautiful new OS that simply continues the NeXT OS lifeline. In theory all the applications I really need like Office and a PIM of some sort are present on the Mac. Except for writing VBA macros to automate Excel I’m in no way a power Office user so even an old version should do. Web tools could be tricky but I only use FrontPage currently and GoLive, DreamWeaver and BBEdit are all available for the Mac, so software isn’t an issue. Being a developer or course means I need some horsepower to compile and a large screen, but they’ve got decent chips and large screens in the PowerBook line, enough for what I’m doing. So the software and hardware are there but what about the price?
Pricing out a new, loaded PowerBook can be scary but it you compare it with a top of the line IBM or Dell laptop you might be surprised to find the ratio of the two to not be too high. Plus you have to look at what you’re getting, and I mean look, the machines are beautifully engineered and just as appealing to look at. The new 15″ PowerBook keyboard is simply divine. So now when we get down to it, why wouldn’t I just plunk down a little more money to get a Mac when I can just pick up a new Dell or Toshiba laptop and be at home in my familiar environment?
Because I’m bored with the PC, it’s too familiar, I know it inside and out and I’m caged in by its mode. I want to try something new, to look at working with a computer on a day to day basis through a different point of view, a simpler one. Yes, even through the eyes of a company that won’t add a second button to their mouse. I want to see what all this hype is about, why everyone I know who has an excellent sense of style uses a Mac and all the slobs PCs.
And so it went.
I’ve learned to live with SPAM in the last few years as has everyone else. When it first started to become a problem I remember thinking I was going to have to change mail addresses to deal with it but then, thankfully, came SPAM filters. To date my hotmail account, although it requires weekly attention, is fairly clean. Alas, today I discovered an entirely new type of SPAM, Blog Comment SPAM.
Some SPAM machine somewhere has an automated way to add blog comments to MoveableType Blogs such as mine. Fortunately only 20 entires were added but it still took me 30 minutes to clean them out of my blog and to turn off comments for all old blog entries and all future entires. Until I find a way to maintain the blog SPAM I’m turning off commenting. Sorry!
I’ll be looking into MT-Blacklist to try and rememdy this so until then, if you want to comment it’s going to have to be via email.