Conánn FitzPatrick

I bought a apple Mac. After a years of raised eyebrows toward mac users, who with out fail refer to there monitor as their computer, the computer a hard drive and their Mac as some sort of deity, I gave in, well kind off. Its nothing fancy and it is certainly not a flagship Mac G5, its a lowly 12in G3 700mhz ibook which I got for a price that made it impossible to say no.

For the last three years I have been beating the hell out of my Hewlett Packard zt1230 running windows XP, It's certainly not the first computer I have ever had but it is the first one I have loved. I have stood on it, tripped over it, dropped it and thrown it and it still works every day without fail. But like all good things it feels like it could come to its bitter end very very soon. The power supply has a twitch and the battery is only good for about 1-2 minutes, windows has updated itself so many times that it takes up about 75% of the 20gb drive. I needed some insurance and this odd looking little white thing showed up on my door.

It's not running tiger and probably won't as it does not have a DVD player, its on a clean install of 10.2.8 which keeps me at my comfort level of two years behind the curve. Back in the 90's when I was working in animation and using money to keep warm, I had every latest thing and it cost tens of thousands every year us to keep up, to stay ahead, and what for. I spent so much time looking at what was coming I missed out on what I had. So when the day came to slow down and try and do what I did, better, one of the first things that had to go was the need for new stuff. If you wait two years, what you buy works, the updates have been written, the hardware is available for everything you would want, and most importantly it costs a fraction of what it would have cost to buy it when it just came out.

So here I am Mac in hand, whats it like, it is fluffy, and cute. First impressions are funny, it works and it works in a way that XP never will. XP is a workhorse and a very good one but this little ibook appears to be a workhorse with wings. After a hour or two of fumbling around to find replacements for right-click, CTRL and the obvious Windows work flow, I started to have very kind flashbacks to when I worked on a mac back in the late 80s through mid 90s, consistency, user centered work flow. Its awful damn pretty, it really is a nice user experience.

Its no all gravy though, you could make toast to left of the keypad if you dare listen to music while ripping a CD. There is no reason on this earth for not having two buttons below the touchpad, scrolling is like pulling teeth and there is no delete just back space (though I could and hope to be wrong on this). Someone please tell me how to do alt characters on an ibook, its so easy on my HP I need one for my name! All of my software is PC and there is no “hey dudes I am switching, can you send me some Mac disks?”.

PC Magazines are reassuringly geeky, they are still beige in every aspect, some even put “sexy” models holding graphics cards on their covers. The whole vibe smacks of our perception of Bill Gates as the milky skinned geek, windows the Orwellian leader of the computer world. (In Mr. Gates defense he does give more money to good causes then most countries and that is something all big wigs could learn from) Mac Magazines are weird! Evangelistic! Steve Jobs is held up as a “David Koresh” type figure, it all has an uneasy cult feeling. Endless justification of their love of all things Mac, an odd, almost creepy self reassurance that even thought its only 5% (guess) of the market its still greater then the Giant.

XP is long in the tooth, will it become a longhorn, while mac goes on to blaze a new train in user experience. Ask me in a few days when I have actually done some work on this lovely little machine, what it is that makes this whole little thing work.