05/07/2006 21:21:41; On The Bleeding Edge Again

Time to play the waiting game once more...

Exciting times for a vetran Mac geek like myself - There were some sweet deals on at Micro Anvika on pre-speed bump machines, so managed to bag myself a 1.83ghz system for about £350 less than the original retail price, complete with 1.5gigs of RAM and a 120GB hard drive.

I have to say, it's pure luxury. After the cramped confines of my faithful (but ever so cramped and underpowered) 12" Powerbook, having something portable that I can do design work on and number crunch with is just peachy. And the screen - gotta love that screen.

Unfortunatley, being on the "bleeding edge" means that a lot of the time things aren't entirely perfect. Having stuck with Apple through a major system transition before (the OS9 to X dual boot nightmare), I'm familiar with the the routine of being trapped between two worlds, comitted to a new platform but handicapped by monolithic software developers who take months to release updated software (Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft...).

Apple have thankfully thought things through a bit better this time and included Rosetta for making non-Intel compatible binaries work seamlessly. They've also put a lot of resources into making sure that all ther apps are Universal, so my copies of Aperture and Logic Pro just pelt along. But despite all the dual core goodness using stuff like Dreamweaver and Photoshop is a bit like running through molasses with fishing boots; possible, but not something you'd want to do on a regular basis.

The downside advantage to all this Intel goodness is that I can now run WIndows natively, which is great for all the grey suit stuff I have to do at work. It does annoy me greatly though that all the stuff that runs slow on OS X due to the lack of Intel compatibilty runs lightning fast under Windows on the same machine, and this had lead me to a dillemma:

The reason I spend extra on a Mac is because I want to run the Mac OS, and there's a certian pride of ownership issue which I won't go into here (see this). However, when you can run the Adobe and Macromedia suites at full speed on that other OS on the same hardware, it makes sense to do so. In which case, I might as well have bough an HP or Dell for almost a third less...

Of course that won't always be true, but the circular logic that went into thinking about it gave me a headache.

(BTW, I decided to stick to my principles and run all my main applications - slow as they are - on OS X.

Tech of the week

Well, obvious as though it is - tech of the week is... my aluminum bad boy MacBook Pro

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