Ding - Dong the Mac is gone

My return to Mac was a failed failed experiment. Years ago, my first computer was a Mac, a PowerPC 7200. Quite a fancy thing, it ran Mac OS 7. I had it throughout Grad school and it worked well. I eventually moved to a PC, primarily since working in the software world made it a requirement to design for PCs, so I jumped on the Windows bandwagon.


When the desktop was slowly dying 2 years ago, i decided to go back to Mac and get a small, used laptop. If Apple didn't charge such a premium for their machines, i would have bought a new one, and that was the start of my problems. I got a used iBook, which has the legacy processor in it, rendering it incompatible with every update Apple issued for their applications. Also there still is a lack of compatibility out there; Netflix didn't work with Mac for a long time, migrating an iTunes library from PC to Mac or vice versa was a complete nightmare. The list goes on.

The thing which gave me the biggest headache was our network drive. The iBook did not want to play nice with it. We store everything there; video, pictures, music. iPhoto likes everything local, and stores your photos in an apparently randomly numbered file system, so good luck trying to find a photo outside of using iPhoto, like when you may want to do something radical, like upload photos to something Apple doesn't own. I had continual trouble getting finder to map the drive and keep it mapped after sleeping or restarting, and iTunes would revert to its default setting and try to move 90GB worth of music. You also can't sync an iPod into both a Mac and a Windows, the Mac will format it. The Mac version of Quicken is the ugly, psychologically unstable step-child of the windows version.

The iBook i bought also had a "quirk" where the motherboard would not recognize the installed Airport wireless card, rendering wireless access unavailable. I finally found a USB network adapter, but by this time the shine had worn off the iBook and i wanted it gone.

So the Mac drove me insane. I got a Dell laptop a few weeks ago. 1/2 the price of a comparable Mac laptop, and *gasp* its compatible with everything. Ding - dong the mac is gone. Someone on eBay got a smokin' deal on the devils iBook.