I remembered way back to my years when I was introduced to the wonderful world of computers. As I was growing, I was using word processors on my good ol' Apple II (yes this predates the Apple IIe). Geez that brought back fond memories. Some of the things I remembered include:
- Having a dot matrix printer which printed mainly text. The ink was mainly a purpley grey colour and geez it was a such a big step up from 1) typewriters due to the correct one's work and 2) handwritten assignments.
- The monitor was isolated to a monochrome colour of green or orange.
- Games were very sparse and limited to what could fit onto a single 5.25" floppy disk. These included the likes of Load Runner, Frogger, Hard Hat Mack and Chess (and I found it hard to beat until many years later).
It wasn't until a few years later that we decided to go the PC route, with the whole line of 286, 386, 486, Pentiums....many, those were interesting times while playing in colour (VGA anyone?). At that point I had never really thought about buying another Apple computer, even after being introduced to them at school. Funnily enough, I believe that this coincided with the change in the helm at Apple...
Well, I never though that it would happen so soon, but I am back in the realms of Apple-dom, as I have gone out and got myself a MacBook. The main driver here is that I don't get given a laptop as part of work any more, so I thought it would be more handy and convenient to have a laptop (especially with travel and so forth). I can safely say that I am really enjoying this laptop, even though I am not entirely familiar with the Mac Operating system, but I'm sure that I will pick it up soon enough.
So far, things I do like about the MacBook:
- Decent specs and build quality for comparably spec'ed laptops and reasonable size. (e.g. built in wireless, bluetooth, camera, firewire)
- Small enough to travel with, without being too bulky (esp. for planes). Luggage space is definitely a premium!
- Wireless N - although I don't have a wireless N router...yet.
- Magnetic power cord - no more tripping over wires and watching in dismay as one's laptop goes sailing across the room.
- Not bad looking in white
- Boot Camp option allowing the user to run Windows if required (this is great for work based computers, since most companies run Windows based PCs)
- Swish OS (OS 10 and 10.5 - Leopard)
Main downsides to current MacBook:
- Attachments/add-ons are expensive ($69 for a white wired mouse, anyone?)
- Too many attachments are optional (no VGA/DVI cable). I guess the plan is minimalist...
- White gets dirty and scratched easily.
- Less applications support Mac OS...which is a shame really.
I guess there is always room for a change - another Mac convert here! I guess it's still early days though, so hopefully all goes well!
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