Switching to the Mac : Acquisition
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?