Best of Both Worlds

I'm a Mac fan from the early days. My buddy got a "Lisa" when we were in grad school, and I got my fist SE in 1987. I relucatantly switched to Windows in '97 when I moved to China, believing it would be hard to support an Apple.

I've had Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, and XP (everything but ME!) And I've had fun with XP the past three years on my Fujitsu laptop. Fujitsu makes great notebooks! I've also had two crummy Compaqs - both desktop and notebook.

As much fun as I've had tweaking everything on Windows and downloading LOTS of extras from the internet, I've wanted to go back to the elegant, efficient days of my Mac experience. Ah, Macintosh . . . it just works! No more of those headaches wondering what's wrong with your machine.

So I switched to a G4 Powerbook a few months ago. It works beautifully.

But what I miss is being a part of the bigger computing world. Reading PC magazine, following the Intel roadmap, looking for Sonoma and Yonah. checking the zillions of add-on utilities and compulsively updating my antivirus definitions and running ad-aware and spybot S&D.

I've felt that Apple produces a superior Operating System, but lags behind Wintel in the hardware department.

I've enjoyed reading all the commentaries this week on Apple's switch, and their predictions of the impact. Here's a good analysis of the technical side: http://arstechnica.com/columns/mac/mac-20050608.ars

Oh yeah, one of the nifty add-ons I miss is the "blog this" button in my browser! No right-click button either : (

So the switch this week by Apple to Intel chips is not a big surprise or disappointment to me, as it was to many of the Mac faithful. I would have liked to buy a new Fujitsu S6240 notebook this year to take advantage of the new technology, but Apple came out with a brilliant new OS "Tiger" this year, while we won't see the next Windows OS "Longhorn" for at least 18 months.

I'm happily using my new powerbook and will enjoy following the news on upcoming generations of Intel chips and anticipating how Apple will put the hardware innovations to use!