Techno-Addiction - MacBook

It was bound to happen. My old G3 iBook (nearly 4 1/2 years old) was in bad shape. So, the hell with bills and debt. We went out to the Apple Store in Pasadena and picked up this baby for a pretty penny (actual amount of pennies with-held) and a free printer after mail-in rebate. Sure, I could have waited until I actually had the money to buy one of these, but screw waiting. I had been dealing with a screen on a laptop that lasted a minute tops before it became a garbled mess of greens and purples. It actually looked like I had somehow tapped into "The Matrix". So, I bit the credit card bullet and plunked down for this sweet computer. Tech-specs for the geeks as follow:

2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
80 GB Hard-Drive
Superdrive (DVD-R/CD-R)
Airport Extreme & Bluetooth
13.3 inch Widescreen display
64 MB of VRAM
2 USB ports & 1 Firewire port
Mac OSX 10.4.8

And it's perfect timing as well, since my days at technical support are numbered (and can be counted with 2 fingers . . . more on that later), my co-workers won't be able to rag on me for not getting a piece of crap PC running Vista. We tend to butt heads when the Apple vs. Windows debate comes up, and I'm usually the only one on my side. Just because I don't want to dry hump the ground Bill Gates walks on. And, I'm blogging 5 minutes after going through the fairly easy to get through set-up. Try that with your PC, bitches.

Vista "Innovation"

I was at the Best Buy yesterday, trying to explain to an aunt of mine the folly of buying a Windows-based PC. So, we were in the laptop aisle, and the store had a couple of Vista-ready machines on display. No prices, because Vista is not released until tomorrow. Actually, funny side note on this. If someone were to actually ring up a computer with Vista installed on it, the Best Buy registers would ring them up with a value of $10,000.00. Yeah, this would be to deter any before the launch sales of PC's with the operating system (OS) in them.

So, back to my observation of the so-called innovations that Vista is packing. Sure, you can put full motion videos of a babbling brook as your background (who cares?) and it all looks "prettier" now. Kinda pretty like a Mac . . . hmm . . . we'll get back to that in a paragraph. But it all taxes your system to the tune of 1 Gig of RAM. To handle the new OS. What are all the people that are still running 256 MB's of RAM or less that we talk to everyday. "Buy a new computer" I guess is what they'll be hearing a lot. Good for commerce. Fucked up for the consumer if you ask me.

And, here's what I'm a little worked up about today. Vista Gadgets. Take a look at these.

It's the ones on the far right of the screen shot. They sure do look helpful right. Nice to have the weather and the time (although, computers already have a clock on the bottom right-hand corner) and other things that tell you about whatever you might want to know. It's nice. It was even nicer almost two years ago when Apple's OS 10.4 came out. It had a little thing called "Widgets". Take a look.

Oh my God (OMG for the cool kids), it's like totally the same thing. Sure, Apple's is less obtrusive, since with a touch of a key on your keyboard then disappear and then come back with the same keystroke. With Vista's . . . they're there unless you turn them off . . . individually . . . what a chore. I'm sure there's a "easier" way to do this, but for the average computer user (or, as they like to call themselves - computer stupid) they're always going to have the "Gadget" just sitting there, taking up real estate on their computer monitors. So, even when Windows clearly borrows (or steals if you want my opinion) from Apple, they don't do it right.

Enjoy your new Vista-ready PC's you dumb fucktards. Remember, those innovations . . . we Apple users have already had for at least a couple of years.