Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

Mike’s post about the argument between him and Lois made me realize that I never officially stated my complete and total love for my Mac Mini. I wanted to wait a week or two after getting it in the mail, and that turned into a month and then that turned into complete procrastination and apathy.

I say it now for the World to read: I Love My Mac Mini.

I’m a computer gadget guy. I did the Computer Science thing in College and took all 5 programming courses in high school. Heck – I wrote my first ‘program’ in LogoWriter while in kindergarten. I’ve done the Windows thing from the beginning, 3.1 all thru XP. At the WinME stage I started realizing that I should not have to reboot my computer multiple times everyday for it to function properly. I was getting tired of buggy device drivers crashing the whole machine without warning. I was getting tired of having to format and reinstall Windows every 5-6 months just to get it running up to speed again. When WinXP came along things did get better. Changing settings within Windows got easier, the interface turned a shade of PlaySkool but overall better than the bland grey of before.

But the bliss of WindowsXP was not to last forever in my eye. I was still reinstalling XP every few months because it had gotten slow, or an install and borked itself and spread it’s destruction beyond what I, a mere mortal, would be able to fix. Then Came Linux.

FreeBSD, actually, but who’s counting. It was So Cool. The BSD installer had the option to download all of the up-to-the-minute packages from a ftp server. That ment I would have a totally up to date computer from the starting line. Gnome and I didn’t mesh all that well, but I fell in love with KDE. So easy to use, and so very much configurable.

BSD evolved to Linux and I tought myself the ./configure make make install to install applications. It was fun, it was different. It was Spyware and Virus Free. Getting sound working was always buggy. I had to get to the terminal to mount and unmount a cd because automount was not turned on by default (which is dumb – tell me one example where someone goes thru the trouble to find a cd and insert it into a drive, and then not want to use it). Getting video with the popular codecs working was a task at futility. My instant messenger would disconnect randomly and often. My rant could go on and on. Linux is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but not ready for the desktop, even for people who mostly know what they’re doing.

And now I have my Mac:
Mac Mini. $499
Memory upgrades and Airport + Bluetooth card: extra: $175.
Having Everything Work Right Out Of The Damn Box: I’d say priceless, but that’s not accurate.

It’s not priceless because I can tell you with total certainty that Every computer I buy in the future will be an Apple product, and that’ll likely cost a good chunk of change. I’m done with Windows, done with Linux. Mac OS X is so beautiful, so fast, so easy, so uncluttered and so powerful that I cannot see any reason to leave the Apple platform.

Life isn’t perfect in Appleland, though. Learning the new keyboard shortcuts is tough, and the mic on my iSight keeps turning off randomly. But Geez… If that’s all I have to complain about….