Dec 4th we went all the way to St Louis... about a hour and half drive one way to the Apple store.. We were prepared to come home with a Macbook and a 24" iMac.. you know, for the Missus and I.
We instead, left empty-handed.. We were very under-impressed. I guess we hyped up the hype inside our heads and set ourselves to be disappointed.
And BOY were we disappointed.. Majorly bummed. I Want To Believe.
I was really shocked that Merche was less than impressed.. She has been wanting a Mac for years now. But when she went to try it out.... she says she hated it... and then went to another store and tried a few PCs.. and fell in love.
Who knew?
One day, though. I love to play with Operating Systems, and I have been wanting to add an Apple Mac to my collection of dozens of operating systems under my belt. Meanwhile, Merche picked out a Dell laptop she fell in love, and I'm going to build a new PC for my photo processing machine.. for a fraction of the cost and a lot more oomph.
Here's my first computer- an Atari 800. I had a modem- you would dial the phone and place the headset in rubber cups.. worked well at 300 baud.
A screenshot of an Atari 1040 BBS dialer program. I loved that thing. See my first GUI desktop on the same computer.. Doesn't it look like an old school mac???
To me, THIS is a lot prettier than any Apple Mac can ever be.
Ohh ohhh speaking of--.. I felt like I was slapped in the face, when an Apple "Genius" approached me while I was looking all around an iMac examining the back, the bottom, etc.. She looked really puzzled... "Hey, how do you open this thing up???" I asked.
"You don't."
"What if I want to replace the hard drive... upgrade the RAM myself?"
"You don't. you bring it here."
"What????!!! And then YOU open it, right?"
"Yes. You really shouldn't try."
"Ok, let me try this... will it void your warranty if I did it myself?"
"Yes."
And what really BURNS me is that if I want to be able to hot-rod my own Mac (under warranty), I will have to shell out $2,799 for the most basic Mac Pro.
SCREW THAT.
Sorry, I'm too much of a redneck hot-rodding techno-phile to find that acceptable.
I'm absoutely NOT a fanboy of Microsoft either.. but.... I have many other choices with my hardware.... :P
Onto happier things:
My first computer "modification" strictly for appearance before it became popular... Yes, I'm THAT nerdy. That by the way was my home dialup Internet sharing firewall that I built myself.. It was in service from about 1997 until 2007. The CPU fan fell off about 4 years before it retired and I never bothered to put it back on. LOL
So nerdy that I helped run the area's first ISP for free... just for fun.
Here's an extremely urgent emergency repair I did for a clien't computer that could not be down no matter what.... LOL
Whew. Ok, I'll quit now.
Monday, December 8, 2008
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6 comments:
I live in an anti-Mac house as well. I love my Dell. I'm a PC user and proud of the fact that I don't need any of Steve Job's crappy apples in day-glo colors. Ok the green one is sort of cute, but I'd never buy a Mac product. Not even an Ipod.
I LOVE my Dell! Although the battery came loose a couple of weeks ago and my comp shut down. I was like wtf? So after I had called the geek squad -- and they wanted to rob me of my warranty even though I have only had this thing since February I had figured it out and it has been working fine ever since. Who does the geek squad think they are!?!
My first comp was a commodore 64 followed with a commodore 128. Ya know before all that windows crap came out. Then I had a gateway -- HUGE mistake! So my first laptop was a Toshiba Satellite which was ok. I read the reviews before I bought it and thought I would love it. It ended up being just ok. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my Dell Inspiron 1526. Oh yes and it has Vista which I don't see what the big deal is. It works fine.
I think the problem with vista is user error and if there is a bug in the update people panic. Hello Learn!! sheesh.
No you are not a geek Tim! We are here with ya!
I've always been hard to impress with Operating Systems... they all promise to cure cancer, do away with world hunger and fail to deliver. I guess I was just at a point in my life where I WANTED to believe in Steve Jobs' vision....
But to be honest, my respect slid a little when he came out with all those candy coated fruity eMacs and pushed these as the pinnacle of what makes an Apple Apple. I was like, what about THE OOMPH??
It's like it's the new Volkswagen Beetle-- the people's wagon for everybody. Which is nice, except it's overpriced. Even if I'm certain it's easy to drive and all... it still doesn't hover, and still requires gasoline. ;) By the way, I always thought that eMacs and the new Beetle's release was perfectly timed... I bet every new Beetle owner has an eMac at home. ;)
Commodore 64!! I never had one, but my best friend did.. I was insanely jealous of how "hackable" that thing was! That was an awesome computer. I still have the Atari 800.. and it STILL WORKS. Isn't that crazy-cool? :)
BTW I ordered Merche a ruby red (Important!!! lol) Dell Inspiron 1525. And they're backordered and wont ship until Dec 19.. Ahhh oh well.
My company sells Lenovos and IBM products... but it certainly isn't impressive from a home-user point of view.. They're plain black- lean & mean business machines. And the WAF factor was very low.
(Wife Approval Factor=WAF)
At least it's not an Macbook which would cost at least twice as much ;)
Ipods fail to move me, too.. ;-D I was temped by the iPhone to be honest.. until that same day I visited the Apple store- when I picked up those itty bitty things and typed..
"yge wiovk browm fpx humpwd iver the lszy fig."
Fuck THAT.. I text while driving all the time (sorry but true) .. the iPhone would KILL me DEAD. :) My Palm Treo is not as sexy, true.. but I can probably type 40 wpm on that sucker without looking.
I AM A GEEK AND I AM PROUD OF IT.
I agree about the Iphone. I tried to text on my friend's recently and it took forever bc I kept hitting the wrong keys.
Don't tell anyone, but I was text-driving yesterday and drove about a half mile without even looking up. Once I got to the top of the street I had to wonder if I hit anyone along the way.
Nah Deanna you would have felt at least a speed bump. :) Try smoking, adjusting the mp3 player, and talking on the phone and/or texting all at once. Not an easy task. Pretty lucky i haven't killed anyone yet.
Tim She will LOVE IT! I have an Inspiron 1526 and it is wonderful! I have even dropped it once (of course not on purpose) and it is still tickin!
I am proud to say I do not own an ipod. Instead I purchased a cheapy mp3 player from Big Lots and it has lasted 5 years! In that time one of my friends has gone through 3 ipods. I keep telling him to give up! lol.
The last time I looked at an apple product it was the new mac air notebooks. Truly I would be scared to drop the thing or one of the kids would stomp on it one day and there goes a few grand in one shot. It is too delicate. However, I do love the weight of it as it is like a feather.
Hey Deanna, how did you get that dent in your fender? hehehe
MidniteBabe-
If you want a tiny little laptop that sole purpose is to get online.. check out the eeePc. It's not designed for photoshop or anything like that.. but I think perfect for Urban living on the go with all the wifi hotspots. They're called "netbooks"
http://eeepc.asus.com/global/
Kind of useless to me in the country with no wifi hotspots, but in the city I would so want one. I much prefer working on a desktop for anything heavyduty, but would love a tiny little laptop for on-the-go communications and web surfin'.
The best thing is that they start at around $250.
TAKE THAT MR. JOBS
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