Tomorrow I could be buying a Mac

Tomorrow I'll have my final paycheck from Deseret Book, including the pay out for all my unused vacation & special sick leave. Though it'll be taxed as though it were a bonus, I rarely used much time off during six years, so I'm excpecting a tidy little sum.

One of the first things I have to do is buy a new Apple laptop. My new job has provided me with a Dell laptop. The first night I brought it home, Meghan exclaimed with disdain and disgust: "they make you use a Dell?!". (I felt like such a proud father! ;-)

While admittedly the stability of Windows has improved in the last six or seven years since I last had the misfortune of using it as my primary OS, but I still have to reboot far too often and put up with other unexplained annoyances. With a Macintosh computing (for me) is a relaxing pleasure. The Aqua interface is beautiful. The product (even down to the packaging) shows real craftsmanship and attention to usability. And it's got the full power of *nix under the hood (yeah!). Running Fisher Price Windows XP I feel physical tension and stress. I need to get back to the zen of OS X ASAP.

Now that my own money is on the line, I'm somewhat torn between being budget concious and getting a 14" iBook or splurging and getting a 15" (or 17"!) PowerBook.

Whichever I buy, I plan on purchasing it from MacDocs, a local Salt Lake shop, because of their philosophy:

Why we do this is simple. At the core our group believes in the product. We feel the Macintosh platform is the pinnacle of personal computing that all other platforms aspire to be.

That really resonates with me.

—Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, March 14, 2005 at 20:36