Apple stuff
Something weird happened to my Powerbook last week: the display has become badly garbled, and it’s not really possible to make out any of the text on the display. Other than that it works fine! Boots up, works as well as I can make out from the screen etc. Annoyingly, an external display shows the same problem, and even VNCing in shows the same distortion on the client display.
Anyway, I haven’t the time to wait for it to get fixed, so I bought one of the aluminium iMacs last weekend, the cheapest 20″ one. Because the Powerbook still works fine, I was able to boot it in Firewire target mode and copy across all the files as part of setup, so the switch was pretty seamless.
I love: the display, the aluminium finish, the new keyboard, the Intel processor, the 1Gb RAM, the 250 GB hard drive. It’s a really beautiful machine, and a lot nicer to use than the Powerbook, which was really starting to show its age.
Slightly disappointed by: the hard drive; I notice when it spins up, from the slight noise and vibration. Still, at least the fan doesn’t make a noise. Also, iTunes coverflow is still not completely smooth! I mean, what do you need, a Mac Pro 8-core with 4Gb of RAM?? And Dashboard still takes an annoyingly long time to load up.
And on the subject of beauty in machines: Stephen Fry on style versus substance:
What do I think is the point of a digital device? Is it all about function? Or am I a “style over substance” kind of a guy? Well, that last question will get my hackles up every time. As if style and substance are at war! As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly. Don’t get me started …
It’s a great piece. In it he claims to be the second person to buy a Mac in Europe (Douglas Adams being the first). I wasn’t the first person to buy a Mac in Africa, but when I bought my Apple ][ (or at least when my father bought it for me) the local distributor was still bringing them out one at a time, so I had to wait three weeks for it. While it didn’t have the GUI of the Mac, it was still a computer streets ahead of the IBM PC which hadn’t been released yet. The user manual, which I still have, is an absolute joy, clearly written by someone who enjoyed writing it; it is fun, funny, and human. Which is what Apple, at its best, can be.
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