A Weekend Well Spent

Last week my home desktop PC, which I built myself 4.5 years ago, showed some final signs of aging—its motherboard quit detecting IDE drives. My first impulse was to check out the latest and greatest from Dell, but to my surprise, Dell is unto something funky with a whole new line of gaming computers priced over $1,000. I don't know what's wrong with Dell and what happened to "affordable computers" but I was badly disappointed. Another problem with Dell is that you have to call "outsourced" help desk should trouble seek you. No offense meant, but everyone I know who called Dell for help has been pretty upset about it. Including myself.

For a few weeks prior to this, I've been checking out Mac laptops and, given the right timing, I decided to bite the bullet and buy an iBook G4 (jpeg, 140K) with an extra 512M of RAM. I also bought 3 years of AppleCare, which looked like a great deal at a decent price. Thanks to a previous exercise with PearPC I already knew my way around the system utilities, network settings, FTP, and so forth.

I've always assembled my desktop PCs myself, but this is my first Mac. I'm very impressed with the attention to tiny details in both the box and Mac OS. I wish the same amount of thought was given to some aspects of WinXP. I miss some "power user" gizmos I'm used to having in XP, though, but I do realize that it's a whole different Mac world. My wife, who never used a Mac, has been very comfortable with it right from the outset (a very good sign).

With this said, I guess no more excuses for me that I didn't test something in Safari. :) So far I'm lovin' it.

Be right back... Need to go make burnt offerings to Microsoft gods so they won't unleash their wrath on me.

P.S. A tip to those who want to buy a Mac in the state of NY: don't try to pay with a personal check. Nobody trusts you here, with the exception of friendly folks at CompUSA.

Congratulations! If you run into problems, have any questions related to configuration, or need software recommendations, just ask and I'll try to help :)

How are you planning on doing any ASP.NET work on this, or aren't you?

Well, can't do much ASP.NET work on it. :) It'll be mostly used for Photoshop, Dreamweaver and such, and for testing my projects in Mac browsers. It's also to used by my wife and daughter, and believe me, I'm sick to death of cleaning the old XP from adware and spyware. :)

I love Macs. OS9 is the best operating system I've ever used.
And I've been around long enough to have used GEM for DOS and MacOS v1.

Not so sure about OSX though. The Dock breaks every UI principle that Apple worked so hard to get right in OS9 and earlier.

With OSX, users seem to "grow" to love it. With OS9, users loved it immediately.

I hope, Milan, that you post a follow-up to this one day ... letting us know how you find working with OSX when it is no longer new and exciting to you.

I bought a mac!!

I want a mac I want a mac!

How come they don't make Logic for Windows anymore?
Doon't make Logic fun now. Only logic pro 7 or expess stuff.
i need it for my work and ngot a new computer and lost Logic fun disc.
Need a mac now. Going to checkon eBayfirst though.

Byee

I love my iBook G4 (1,2Ghz 12" 768 MB DDR SDRAM)
I'm really comfortable with it...
Don't forget to check the new release of Microsoft Messenger for Mac OS X (version 5.0). It really made my disappointment on the chatting front much lighter, I haven't touched my PC ever since 3 weeks ago (or at least I haven't worked on it).

I grew up with Macs and it's time to switch back.
UNIX is a very stable system, and everything comes together in a nice and unique way. Thank you Apple.

/ Hammid Shahrokni - Stockholm, Sweden

I bought a 12 inch ibook today. it kicks ass . The attention to detail is extraordinary. The power supply was over engineered to its finest, it has a cable reeler, the macintosh itself if small, very thin and silent !!!

Our school has about 40 ibooks, that you can use in the classroon on our desks. They have internet and everthing. They rock. We have to carts some are ibooks, and some are an ibook G4.

Used a Mac, didn't really like it. Decided to keep to Linux and Windows. Windows Vista is sooo good, I abosulty love it. You should try it, it is really good.
-Snow

I've always wanted a Mac because of the flashy desktop environment, but now I have openSuSE 10.2. and I installed Beryl and Compiz. KDE looks flashy with them, so I figured I won't need a Mac at all. Recently, a friend bought a MacBook. He doesn't have any experience with computers, and I had to play around with it. I like it and have been planning to buy a Mac soon, but I still don't like it in some other matters. Well, at least it's not crapy like Windblows. Besides, I'm glad that OSX is based on Unix shell now.

Go Unix!