January 06, 2005
A Pleasant Surprise
I got a pleasant surprise yesterday: A brand new, top-of-the-line 14" 1.2 GHZ G4 iBook with a 60GB HD and 768 MB of RAM. Actually, I got two pleasant surprises. The first was the computer, the second was setting it up.
While I've been a long-time Macintosh devotee—my old iBook is just two months shy of its fourth birthday, and I had two iMacs and an LCIII before that—Apple won me over in an entirely new way yesterday.
Thanks to the beauty of the iBook's Firewire support and the ease of the Apple setup program, I was able to move my entire 20GB hard drive contents from old to new, and upgrade Office X to Office 2004—switching over 4 email accounts and, in the process, importing over 163,000 email messages (that's just post-college) and nearly 2,000 address book entries—with not one problem or lost piece of data. At the end of all of it, guess how much re-customization I had to do for my new computer?
One thing: I had to rechoose my desktop photo. Everything else was done for me—including the customization of my dock, Finder windows, iTunes playlists, song ratings, and play counts, iPhoto albums, unread Newsfire feeds, iChat icons and names, and Entourage folders and email accounts; every password was moved over; and every document was in exactly the same place. Apple is amazing. Plus the new computer is beautiful, bright, and fast.
Add to this the issue that I've never had a virus or had my computer weighed down by spyware, and I ask myself: Why does anyone have a PC?
In a word? Games. :-)