Matthew LaVelle’s weblog

It’s been almost 15 years since the last time I used a Macintosh machine. I was raised a Windows baby like most of the rest of us. However, as of last week I’ve ended my three year quest of research and fund raising to finally get back to Mac. You can ask any of my friends and coworkers and they’ll be quick to back me up that the search has really been three years. Three very long, very annoying (especially for my coworkers) years. In fact, the only thing more annoying than my search for an affordable Mac has been trying to find a weak spot in Apple’s pricing matrix.

I’d love to meet some of the people that price out the current, refurbished, and sale items on Apple’s website. Talk about having a lock on pricing, sheesh! I’m quickly reminded of a couple of months ago when a good friend called me all excited about some department store going out of business. His excitement ended up being warranted in that he had found some 30 gig video iPods on sale at a liquidation sale for $240! $60 off! I mean, that has to be the best deal I’ve ever seen on an Apple product. And it literally takes a store going out of business to be able to discount it’s merchandise that much.

Anyway, enough about Apple’s pricing matrix and their ability to hold on to a key niche in the professional computer users market. I have, finally, bought my Mac and although it’s an older refurbished model iBook, it’s mine! And, I’m loving it so far for several reasons. Reasons? What reasons? I’m oh so glad you asked:

• Superior industrial design: Until recently I was using a Toshiba Satellite notebook. Although Toshiba does make a nice notebook machine, it’s no where near as cool looking as my iBook. Two obvious points goes to Apple for the coffee shop/cafe factor.


• OS 10.4 Tiger: Windows XP may as well rollover and play be dead…seriously. That OS/kernal/NTFS is in dear need of an overhaul. There are too many things to list them all here, but the fact that programs can run independent of the operating system alone puts OS X miles ahead of the competition. Score. Apple.


• Dashboard: Ok, at first, I thought “Oh great, a collection of memory hogging programs that runs at startup!”. Although Dashboard does hog a bit of memory it is a very neat little widget board. At a glance, I can check my ever-fluctuating Google stock, where the cheapest petrol in town can be found, search for something on Google, and post a quick weblog entry through WordPressDash. Muy bueno, Manzana.


• iCal: As Apple boasts on it’s website there are over 200 new features in OS 10.4, so I still have a lot of exploring to do. So far the most Ubercool tool I’ve found has to be iCal. I’ve played with Microsoft Outlook a little bit in Windows world (just enough to make me want to open up my PC case and take an ice pick to the motherboard) but it’s not intuitive and doesn’t let me handle events, alarms, and to-do lists the way I want to use them. So, until recently I’ve been using 37signals Back Pack web application. A great application, to be sure, but I’ve gotten so entrenched in iCal that I’ll be using that program from here on out.


• Quartz Extreme: OS 10.4 features a graphics rendering system that provides superior anti-aliasing of fonts to any other operating system. Apple has harnessed the power of the OpenGL to render surfaces in OS X. Quartz 2D works to render screen fonts, images and the Aqua UI to show off the best looking group of pixels you’ll ever see in an operating system.

So that about sums up my first 10 days worth of experience with Apple’s OS X and my new iBook. The only thing I have left to do is go buy some stock in AAPL.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 9:48 am and is filed under Macs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.