I went and "switched" ...

This last week on the way home from the office I stopped off at the local Apple store and purchased a brand spanking new 15" Powerbook, with 100 Gig HD, 1 Gig RAM, and 128 Mb video card. About the only thing left would have been to get the 17" monitor which I see no purpose for.

So I started playing with it as soon as I walked in the door of my house - my wife's comment was something like, "you are more proud of that new laptop than you were when you got your little girl last year for father's day!" She's wrong, I love my little peaches but hey I am a geek and this is a brand new powerbook.

I didn't get Tiger - the guys at the store convinced me to hang on, and I agreed with them. Some great articles about Tiger have been in the news. The best being the Ars Technica article . I have read it three times and have finally gotten a solid understanding of what's going on underneath the hood. I like articles that make me think about how things work. I also picked up a copy of Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks. I'm not sure I am a unix geek but this book as showed me how to do things the mac way that I commonly do on all my other *nix boxs.

I have also installed SubEthaEdit, Fink, Ethereal, iTerm, iPodder, and NetNewsWire Lite. All of these programs are shareware utilities. My powerbook was more valuable to me in about 2 hours of work than the usual 4 hours of work it takes me to get my Windows XP boxes ready to go. Plus all of the utilities I installed didn't cost me another arm and a leg to Microsoft for them.

To understand what I mean check out the article I mentioned about comparing Apples to oranges-Dell . That article had a follow up today comparing Apples to IBM Powerbooks.

I am noticing things I need to do some research on: .png files not showing up correctly in Safari, some ASP pages don't behave correctly under Safari or Firefox, blogger.com editor doesn't have all the options in Safari, have to convert old exchange to mbox then import into mail to import finally into entourage.

I will keep you updated as the machines joins my family of 9 other pcs. We counted them at lunch today.

Oh it already made a friend in my wife. I took my son's first soccer game, edited it with iMovie, and then burned it to DVD with titles using iDVD (5 copies, grandparents, and a dear friend, and of course a copy for mom and dad) all in about an hour. It made up for my sudden infatuation with a piece of warm aluminum.