After 10 years, I have a new computer…

Jeez, took long enough. I built my old computer with my very own two hands, slaving away in menial jobs to gather the wages to pay for the top of the line parts that were gonna make life oh so worth living! Well, it was a decent computer and, of course, after two months I was completely disheartened by the discovery that new computers from the likes of Dell and Gateway were coming with the parts I’d paid a pretty penny for and were selling for much less than I paid for the ‘experience’ of creation. Two months after that I became crushed at the site of bargain PCs with all the fixins selling for a couple beaver pelts. So I swore I wouldn’t play their little reindeer games! Nope, not me! It actually worked out rather well after all this time. Of course, I haven’t been able to play a game in 9 years due to the lack of power on my graphics card, but that’s just time wasted right?

Well now I’m in the driver’s seat again! A brand spanking new Apple 20″ iMac G5 is adorning my desk and I am loving every minute trying to figure out how the hell it works. I used to be a Mac guy way back in the day but my last Mac OS was 9 and this OS X is totally different. I think I’ve got the hang of it though. It just continues to shock me how simple it is. I must’ve installed every type of *nix there is a few dozen times each and I still haven’t been able to put together an install that was as clear and easy to maintain as Apple has done here. I love the application packages. Freaking brilliant. I was actually so used to the Windows desktop behavior that I worried I wouldn’t take to the ‘free’ windows of OS X. Not to worry, I actually find myself annoyed to go back to my work XP machine. Seems like in the OS X implementation I use more of the screen real estate with multiple applications than on XP. Usually I only have one application dominant on the screen at a time in XP. Even with the stock 512Mb or RAM it still isn’t hanging like XP would under load. Must be that 64-bit processor and the DDR2 RAM working together. I was actually entertaining the idea of going out and getting a 2Gb DIMM to bump my system to 2.5Gb or RAM (!), but now I realize that if is spend $150 versus $1000 for 1Gb instead, I’ll probably not notice $850 worth of performance. Hell, it’s pretty good the way it is and I’ve been pounding on it for four days straight!

Well, there you have it for now. Much like picking up snowboarding after skiing, I don’t see myself purchasing another ‘Wintel’ box anytime soon. There are just too many good things about Apple to go back to the bargain bin again. Now if Steve lets a dual-core Yonah Powerbook out of the gate this January, I may have to rethink the ‘tel’ part of the boycott…