Afishionados,

I’m happy to announce two new additions to our beloved family. Two new Intel Macs have been purchased for our humble home. A new 24; 2.4 GHz iMac and a 15″ 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro. Woo hoo. This brings the total number of Macs in the house to four, and the number in the family to five. Sure, we’ve still got a couple retarded PCs in the house but every family has its losers, right?

The big incentive for the le grande purchase was video chatting. Have you ever tried to video chat on a PC with more than one person? No, of course you haven’t because it’s ridiculously difficult if not impossible. Skype is free, but the video quality is crappy. AIM is nice, but what do you do it the person you want to chat with is on Yahoo? Bleh.

I’ve had my first foursome this week (video chat, anyway). My nephew in Cleveland was able to talk to Grandpa, Grandma, his Aunt, and myself, all for free and through the power of iChat. I’ve done video chats before, but never with more than one person at a time. It’s amazing how well it actually worked and the video quality was pretty good.

I don’t know why, but with so many new Macs in the house I’ve been thinking about my first Mac computer. It was the Titanium PowerBook G4 and it was (and still is) one of the sexiest computers ever. The tech specs are laughable by today’s standards, but in 2001 they were, as Darth Vader would say, impressive. Most impressive.

My TiBook had a 500 MHz G4 processor, 256 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte hard drive, a DVD-ROM drive (no burning of any kind), a 15″ screen with 1152 x 768 resolution, and Mac OS 9.1. The starting price was $3499, but that was before I added the wireless networking card, which was an additional $99.

In comparision, my MacBook Pro has a 2.4 GHz processor, 4 gigabytes (4096 megabytes) of RAM, a 160 gigabyte hard drive, built-in wireless networking, a DVD/CD burner, a 15″ screen with 1440 x 900 resolution, and Mac OS X 10.4.10. The cost of my model MacBook Pro is $2499. So the features have gone up but the price has come down.

I uncovered, after much, MUCH digging within Google, the original Titanium PowerBook information video. It’s only 5 minutes long, and it’s funny to see how excited everyone is by something that, by today’s standards, is an obsolete antique. Still, I wish I’d kept mine around for nostalgic purposes, but I sold it many years ago for the 667 MHz version.

The video is cool, I promise. It even has the song “Rain Dance” by Karl Jenkins in it. You can’t lose!

The Dell Inspiron 8600 that the MacBook Pro replaced has been formatted with an all-but-legit permanently activated version of Windows Vista Ultimate and is on its way to my brother Drew, who’s hard as hell on all his electronic equipment, gadgets, and toys. I figure, if you’re going to beat the shit out of something, might as well be a Dell with Windows.

(To the Dell’s credit, I am impressed that the ~3 year old laptop runs Windows Vista Ultimate with all its glorious bells, whistles, and eye candy. But, it’s still Windows.)

I’m sold on Macs for life. If you’re a Windows user and you’re happy with your PC, that’s great. I’m not looking to start a platform war. But if you’re a Windows user and you’re unhappy, remember: You don’t have to love your computer. But you certainly shouldn’t have to hate it, either.

Think different.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 7:14 pm and is filed under Apple Mac, Awesome, Computers, Family, Introspection, Nostalgia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.