MANY ANNALS OF APPLE

…but little drama. I’ve been an Apple user ever since a fried hauled a six month old original Macintosh, (‘the Macintosh-128k, floppies only,) and gave the $4,000 computer to me in the fall of 1984. I used that machine until 1992, when I got a hand-me-down Macintosh HD30, and in short order had an LC, LCII, shared a Performa 638, was gifted with an old Mac laptop; always running several years behind the leading edge. In 1998 I bought my first new Apple, a G3, and used it for seven years. Then, in 2005 I bought a refurbished MDD, which remains my principle computer. I’m tied to the current PPC by virtue of the investment toward turning it into a digital recording platform.

It adds up to seven Apples over 24 years. Having to use godforsaken PC’s at work has only verified the superiority of my almost completely trouble-free experience. For example, my two year old HP tower at work crashes more in a week than my Macs due in a year. Actually, my five year old MDD running Tiger has crashed twice in the past year. I don’t have a big brief against the Wintel XP experience except for the crashing, almost all of which has to due with piss-poor memory management on the 2gb RAM HP hunk-o-junk.

Over the years I’ve experienced one hard drive failure! And, it was trivial since it was a font server. Although I’ve learned how to get into the box and done lots of upgrades, I’ve never had to deal with any kind of serious computer problem. I’ve helped lots of people to enter the Apple world. Over the past few years this has meant hipping people to the value proposition of refurbs from Apple.

But, when it became clear Apple was going to refresh the MacBook line, I set my eyes on a new one. My wife has a white refurbed MacBook, and I figured the new ones would be just the ticket. I started reading the forums and macrumors to learn what was to be in store for me. I dismissed what seemed to be preposterous ‘early’ intel on removal of Firewire.

Imagine my surprise when the new line was released and it turns out Apple has plucked the Firewire out, and, worse, has opted for the slightest uptick in speed in the new chipset. Although Firewire isn’t immediately necessary, my audio dreams prefer Firewire. The new graphics set-up held little appeal because I’m not a gamer. I waited to see what the speed boost would be in relation to a last generation plastic MacBook. It was about 15%.

I jumped on a black last generation MacBook. It cost $400 less than a new one, cost the same as a new white one, and so I accepted once again being behind the edge. Although I was surprised Apple didn’t release substantially faster machines, the fact is I simply opted for the best value proposition given my current and future (audio) requirements. No real knock on Apple, but the underwhelming new laptops won’t excite me until the next refresh spawns refurbs.

Except I won’t need a laptop. My attention will eventually turn to replacing the desktop and, even if the horizon is several years away, I assume I’ll be looking to build (what’s termed,) a Hackintosh–a DIY machine that leverages a plug-in BIOS advantaged by the open source underpinnings of OSX.

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