The one that I was supposed to deliver on Sunday, lol.
Anyway, details are sketchy (and I’ll tell you why in a minute), but I’ve somehow managed to come back from my Aunt Gail’s house in St. Louis with a surprise promise:
somewhere around the end of this month (her payday), she will be sending me a Mac.
……………..
Y’know, I could say the obligatory “OMGBBQw00t!!1”, but that would be quite embarassing since, at the moment, I’m a bit too tired to write that much. So, I’ll just offer some basic dialogue to suffice until, say, I come back from school today (yes, classes have started, and just yesterday, I replaced one class with another. Quite nice for starters, btw).
OK, so if I’m getting a Mac/any-Apple-product, which exact one should I get, and with which processor?
1. High-end
PowerMac (PPC)
Powerbook (PPC)/Macbook Pro (Intel)
2. Middle-end
iMac (PPC/Intel)
iBook? (PPC)
3. Low-end
Mac Mini (PPC/Intel)
“Macbook”/Minibook? (PPC, soon to go Intel)
So, the questions which are boggling me at the moment with the pricing are:
– Buy the cheapest (Mac Mini)?
– Buy the PPC’s (before they’re phased out) or Intel?
– Buy the notebooks (iBook/Macbook or Powerbook/Macbook Pro)?
– Buy the flagship desktop (iMac)?
Plus, with having switched from PPC to Intel, I’m wondering what Apple’s going to rename the “Power-” products. Sure, they’ve redubbed the Powerbooks as Macbook-Pros (obviously a reflection of their status as “professional” notebooks), but that still leaves the iBook, which I don’t think should be changed since they have retained the iMac for their Intel switch. Maybe I’m just thinking along the lines of “For every Mac, there’s a Book”.
And plus, along the lines of the aforementioned quip, I’m wondering if Apple will come out with a “Book” equivalent to the Mac Mini. Exactly what would that look like? Obviously, it would be cheaper than the Mac Mini (and even more portable), but that would be true if only Apple found a way to further deprecate the size of the LCD screen and other basic components.
Or maybe they could deprecate the size/number of the OS and/or applications to fit into a smaller, more economic size? A few Linux distributions, such as Puppy Linux and Vector, already have ventured into the “Small System” field, which has already benefited alot of people who’ve wanted a way to save their legacy Wintel PC’s. Softwarewise, it wouldn’t be that hard for Apple to pull it off; in the hardware area, of course, Apple may have a tough time.
For instance, how much smaller can you make a notebook/laptop? How minimally can you compress a keyboard, hard drive (with all the necessary outlets), AND screen (the most important part) hardwired together into one portable desktop (not to mention the issue of memory and RAM)?
If they were to pull off with a notebook what they accomplished with the Mac Mini or the iPod nano, I would even get a part-time job just to get it. Seriously, I would.
In the meantime, though, since she (my Aunt) doesn’t have access to a functioning PC at home, I’ll probably direct her to the Apple Store in the Galleria (in STL), or at least get her husband (who works at an office job that regularly requires MS Office) to go to eBay and pick one of those (since they sell cheaper, anyway).
Oh, and in other news: Yahoo Mail Beta (just got it over the weekend) sucks: it crashed Firefox and won’t recognize the IE7 beta. The only thing that I found useful was the RSS Reader, which is by no means comparable to Google Reader, but does barely pass my expectations. I moved a few RSS feeds from GReader to YMail Beta, but only did that on a school PC.
Otherwise, its still a piece of crap, and I doubt that such issues are going to be resolved by them, considering the apparent lack of transparency (blogs on Yahoo are only reserved for Y360 members, YSearch, “My Web” 2.0, YMusic, YME Plugin devs, and that’s it. Updates to the YMail “What’s New?” page are barely kept up to date, and Yahoo Groups has no blog to account for it). At least Dad (and SBC-Yahoo DSL subscriber) will be spared of them once SBC is reassimilated into AT&T, and Yahoo Plus is finally scraped by Q3 2006.
Anyway, that’s it.
