Well, after working some overtime and getting some “gumint cheez” (aka Bush’s attempt to fix the recession) I went and took the plunge! I got the top of the line new iMac.
A bit of Geek-bragging;
- 24 inch screen at 1920 x 1200 resolution
- 3.06 Ghz intel Core 2 Duo processor
- NVidia GeForce 8800GS with 512mb memory
- Built in 802.11n, Bluetooth and Gigabit Ethernet, USB/Firewire ports
- 4Gb Memory, 320Gb HDD
Damn this thing rocks! And of course, as soon as I unpacked it from the box, plugged it in, and BLAM, it was running. No hours of reconfiguring windows.
As usual, I had to name it soon after using it, and it had me a little bewildered for a bit. Then I saw the jet black reflective Apple logo on the front and it hit me, Indigo. The name sticks and now Indigo gets along famously with Lippy the Leopard powered MacBook Pro and Maxi, the homebuilt PC. The only thing that keeps me from being totally happily networked is the fact that Maxi has Vista on it. Needless to say, that only works when you hold your tongue just right.
I was tempted to upgrade Maxi again, even though it’s still top of the line. Pam brought a new Intel chip home from the Employee program, and it’s a quad core. But when I looked at how I was using machines around here lately, I knew it had to be a new Mac. I was spending all my time on Lippy (The MacBook Pro), even so far as setting up a dock station for it and an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. I was using it as a desktop. At that point I knew the future for me was Mac.
Yes, I know, I was a Micro$oft flag waver for years, but Vista changed all that. Installing the 64 bit edition of Vista Ultimate was the DUMBEST thing I ever did. I’m still on the cusp of putting XP back on the machine and using a boot manager. The boys in Redmond really blew it this time and they’re losing market share for it :) I love it!
No, I don’t think Micro$oft is in danger of falling down, or that Apple will capture enough market share to challenge the windows base any time soon. I do think that this will spur on Apple development and make more software available. I just hope that the average Windows developer doesn’t make the change over to the Mac. Most windows programs are badly written and prone to bugs. The Mac world doesn’t tolerate things like that (Another nice part of switching).
So, I welcome Indigo to the fold, and she seems to like it here. Not even a Kernel panic yet, and she is the main workhorse here. Uptime tells me she has been running for 9 days 13 hours and 55 minutes. I believe the last reboot was caused by a firmware update too, not a crash. I do love it so.
The only problem, learning to program i n XCode and Objective C :) Well, I’m off to work on a new project! Ciao for now :)
