I’ve finally stepped over. I’ve ordered a new 13″ shiny white macbook. Extra RAM too (2GB), to try and future-proof it as much as possible, since I’m not getting anything else for a long time. This will of course be my new laptop notebook. It’s kind of weird, moving to a completely new system.
Traditionally, I’ve been a computer nerd. I still am. My current laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T23, running (of all things) gentoo linux. That’s quite different from the supposed paragon of GUI glory that is OS X. I’ve been used to setting up things from the most fundamental level of kernel hacking and command line manipulation, configuring pretty much everything to the way I wanted it (or at least the bare level of functionality that I could cope with without spending 17 more days leafing through manuals). Now everything, I’m told, “just works”. Hmmm.
There’s a great set of penny arcade comics about slowly growing to love the mac (be warned about the links, ye of faint constitutions. The content/language/world view/existence of the series is a little… florid). I feel a little the same. In two weeks time, I will have progressed from declaring my hatred of mac systems (prompted largely by the fiendish filemaker database CBS used for many years) to owning two ipods and a macbook. Oh well. Three cheers for hypocrisy.
The main reasons for the switch were essentially the apps I use. I tend to use my computer to manipulate and muck around with images and audio, and for college. I’ve currently got the GIMP under both Windows and Linux for all my image editing needs, and it’s available for Mac too, under X11. If Kristy keeps doing advertising stuff for her work and church, and Adobe keep their student discount for CS3, we might get that down the track. At the moment that’s $500 we don’t need to spend though.
The other main thing is that I’m going to get Accordance for my studies. Whatever I did, in order to get powerful bible software I would have had to change my setup, either to Windows or Mac. I like the power available in Accordance, and the breadth of Bibleworks (which apparently is one of its major strengths - you can get a much wider variety of modules for it) doesn’t effect me now anyway, as I’m only concerned with English, Greek and Hebrew.
So it’s coming in just under 2 weeks. We get a (almost) free ipod with it, thanks to an educational rebate. Kristy is happy. When that happens, I’ll probably set up the laptop as a windows machine for Kristy to use when she’s teaching, and make our desktop into a linux server to keep music and image data on. I’m thinking ubuntu… I’d like to try it. But that will be a story for another day (when I get sick of playing with my shiny new mac).
