Behold, Excalibur

When my parents divorced, Dad bought a house next door to one of those people who seem made for an anti-smoking campaign. A man with emphysema so bad, he could not walk to the mailbox without pausing to catch his breath, yet who sat out in front of his house smoking between hits on the oxygen tank.

Last few months, that's the closest analogy I can think of to the way my PC has performed. It was time for a new machine this time last year, though I couldn't afford it. Still can't, but...

I used to work in an anomalously PC-dominated art department, and when you spend 90% of your time on a PC, Macs seem counterintuitive and strange. Bizarrely overpriced as well.

Mac users always told me I just didn't get it.

It was true. When I lost that job, I ran into a familiar, though strange, phenomenon. Art directors and other potential employers didn't think I'd be able to cope with a Mac. I mean, I worked on Macs even when I worked in Sauron's dungeon, just not a whole lot. But the logic was funny: Macs are supposedly more user friendly, yet someone who can master the workings of a PC might not be able to use one.

My present boss was not immune from this. He seemed actually horrified at the thought of a PC art department. When I explained that we mostly had PCs and mostly shared a few Macs in my last job, he said, 'God, why?' When I said it was economics, that PCs were cheaper, he blurted, 'But Macs are better!'

It's a bitch when your boss is right, but he was. As my three-year-old AMD powered PC has gradually gotten more and more pitiful, I've noticed the g5 of the same vintage on my desk at work is still truckin' along. It's not going to set a land speed record by today's standards, but it's stable and reasonably powerful. And it still has enough balls to handle simultaneous Adobe CS3 applications with Quark, Mail, etc. running.

Also, the 23" display at work was making my Antiques Road Show 17" monitor seem crowded on the home front.

Still, I have Adobe CS for the PC. I can upgrade (about time, too), but it looks like you can't upgrade across platforms, meaning I'd have to pay for a full version of CS3 to switch. That adds roughly $1200 to the price of a Mac, and Macs, if you haven't noticed, run high to begin with.

Turns out, though, Adobe does have a way to do this: you have to give them an affidavit that you've destroyed your PC copy, and they decommission that serial number. Then you can buy the full version for the Mac at the upgrade price. Still pretty expensive software, but no more than if you had danced with the horse that brung you while upgrading.

And I've had first-hand experience now with Apple's tech support, and it lives up to the hype.



So I tried doing an Apples to Onions comparison, and here's what I found: you can get a PC that has just as big a set of balls as a Mac but you don't save money doing it. If you really compare processor speed (easier now that Mac uses Intel chips), bus speed, video card memory and speed, RAM speed, monitor size, etc., there isn't much difference between the platforms. Maybe a bit more of one in the Mac Pro category, but hard to say since there are precious few dual to quad chip PCs being sold. And in any case, a Mac Pro starts out way beyond my reach.



An iMac, however, is only way more than I can afford. You get a nice big monitor integrated with the unit, a wicked fast dual core processor, a cavernous hard drive, and quite a bit of DDR2 RAM.

I ordered it the day after Thanksgiving, not so much to contribute to the general economy as because the funds I'd planned to use for it showed up in that day's mail. They had a $101 off deal going that day, as it happens, and since I had been thinking about pulling the trigger even ahead of this check coming in...



It was like watching Santa on Christmas Eve tracking the shipment. It was in Shanghai one night, Anchorage the next afternoon. It was in Indiana the next day, and Kansas City the next. I've spent the past couple evenings migrating data from the PC, making the software switch etc., and what can I say, but this machine puts the one at work, the one that did most of the selling, to shame. It's a mushroom-cloud-laying...

One thing I still haven't gotten used to: the keyboard. I haven't touched a Mac keyboard that was worth spilling a soda on since 1997 or so. The minimalist thing, in the case of a keyboard, not so much for me. I liked the IBM Selectric I learned to type on in eighth grade. I won't buy a laptop because they have MacDonald's cash registers for keyboards. I like a full sized keyboard with an action to it. And the minimalist keyboards like the one I use at work, which barely has enough plastic to hold a full Qwerty set, you could hide my new iMac's keyboard under it.

The base of the new keyboard is relatively hefty, so it doesn't (as you would expect) actually skip across the desk when you type on it. But the keys feel like...

Okay, it's like you buy a Mac, pay through the nose for the best, and the keyboard is something you'd get for opening a checking account or selling ten magazine subscriptions. A coworker is supplying me with some older Mac keyboards so I will quit bitching about this. But Apple, innovators that they are, should get the message that this is not okay. If I had the budget and needs, I could spend $18,000 on a Mac (a Mac Pro maxed out) and they'd still send me this sorry excuse for a keyboard. You should at least be able to opt for big boy pants if you don't like the shorts.



Still, I love the new machine. I mean really, I wanna have sex with it. If I met a woman this fast, I'd have some newly minted social disease, but if she was this good at everything, it would be a happy sort of infection.

Now I need to scare up more freelance work to pay for the machine I bought to do my freelance work. Fools progress?