Meta Comment

We’ll that’s that. Today my Father ordered up his
Mac Mini; This family has officially switched (back). Although, to
be honest I don’t remember if our first home computer was the Amstrad
or the Apple
Macintosh LC II. I’ve made my way up the post-Columbus
Mac ranks, starting with this Revision B iMac, up to a Graphite iMac (Special
Edition) then onto the laptops with the Graphite iBook (what a perfect little
bundle) and from there up to the iBook G3 900Mhz, which I run on to this very
day. This Mac Mini (we grabbed the top spec 1.42Ghz, 512, DVD-RW, 80GB, AEX, BT
version) will be the first “family Mac” since our LC II - and that’s really
where this bundle-of-joy is aimed. A PC Replacement Mac to compete with Dell and
Laptops, in size and speed it wins, in terms of “out of the box experience”
there is nothing like a new Mac, OS X and iLife ‘05… try beat that
“EasyCDware!” or “PhotoPics Album L.E. Edition” - the processor (& msconfig)
heavy apps that come with any new Tosh or Fujitsu
today.Moving to Windows was the worst
decision we ever made and in the long-term, a most costly worst-decision too…
to add up fees from Help Lines (in the early days), Rogue Dialers, Data
Recovery, Anti-Virus (5 years of subscriptions), Upgrades (I remember paying
£45 for 128mb RAM). All that time spent Googling around for hacks to fix
that joke of an operating system (98 then XPee), re-writing lost essays (or at
least re-searching Google)
downloading weekly software updates or patches… Time spent restarting, and
restarting again, to find a computer I turned off last night, won’t start in the
morning - for NO reason. bah! It’s all over… it’s all so much simpler from
over here. And silent
too.However, thinking only of the
short-term we bought a Compaq Presario, in fact we bought two - one for me and
one for my brother. I got the Tower, he had the Desktop. They were alright for a
week, although (I was 12) I used it to find Apple Ads (On Apple.com back in ‘98
you could download all the Ads in PDF form) I printed them on 20 sheets of A4
and plastered my room. Amusingly enough, I have a real Apple poster - the same
as that PDF hanging on my wall today. I also discovered QTVR and the iMac back
then… it all makes sense now. I guess we weren’t drawn to Macs back in 1998
because they looked too good, almost childish - for months I couldn’t trust OS X
- it was too pretty, I didn’t believe it could really take a hammering like a
fresh install of Windows 2000. But 3 years on from my iMac - I believe! A
further reason was PC World didn’t stock iMacs, and the thought of ordering from
America in ‘98 was frightening (to my parents - my Sister was an e-Bayer back
then). The Compaq came with PC World’s nudge and wink and “oh we’ll be here to
guide you through” bollocks.My father
doesn’t believe hype - nor does he trust or like Steve Jobs. He doesn’t trust
computers (good on him) and has many a time used the line “it’s only a
computer”. I like this line, but it comes with the mental image of turning on a
box, pressing “go” and doing what you want to do. This is not the microsoft
experience, Plug-and-Play was a damned lie. But he sees my silent iBook and my
un-hastled browsing, non-spammed e-mail and user-friendly eye-candied operating
system and the line “its only a computer” works. Dad’s a switcher, I really
don’t believe it myself - hah… muahahahahaha. Oh apple did some other things
yesterday, I won’t mention them
here.