white male consumer

I owned my 12″ PowerBook G4 since the summer of 2005. I still own it, and it still works, sorta.

But the poor thing finally took one nose dive onto the floor too many. I was working at the kitchen table (coolest room in the house during this mid-90s, heat index in the 100s heat wave) when the black-and-tan dog went into a trashcan, cherry picking a tissue to tear up. I jumped up, snagged the power cord, and down went the PowerBook.

Now, the thing seemed fine, besides being perhaps slightly more irregularly shaped than before. But after working awhile longer, I noticed the power cable wasn’t charging the battery. ruh-roh. On a five year old laptop (with a four year old battery, gratis because of that recall once upon a time), this is not a good thing. I had grown accustomed to about 30 minutes per charge, and being permanently tethered to a wall outlet. I tried an old power cord that I had, and it still did nothing.

I may or may not now have a job which kind of requires the use of a computer. So I said “F it!”, broke down, and bought a new laptop. What a difference five years makes. I bought from the Apple refurbished store, as that was where I picked up the PowerBook, and I had no issues due to that fact. You can stand to save a few hundred dollars.

I went with the 13″ MacBook Pro, with a 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gb of RAM, 250gb of hard drive space, the GeForce 320M graphics card, etcetera etcetera. I very nearly convinced myself to go to a 15″ with an Intel i5 processor and graphics card with dedicated memory, but considering that I’m coming from a 1.5Ghz PowerPC, I honestly don’t know at what point I could justify the increase in computer power. (Probably the first time I sit down to do some video editing, but oh well. Really. The job I may have now doesn’t pay well enough for the 13″ to begin with.)

I also strongly favor the smaller footprint of the 13″. One thing about the 12″ PowerBook was it’s small size, and comparisons between the two on that subject are about a zero sum game. The MacBook is distinctively wider (wider screen = clearly worth it!), but it is also slimmer, top-down. I also appreciate the fact that the metal casing is simplified (not “one piece” exactly I see now, the bottom is removable) so that when I do start dropping it, it will not get bent out of shape as easily as the PowerBook. I’ll need to take a photo or two of its current status so that the world can see what I mean here.

OSX 10.6 is clearly a step up from 10.4, and everything I’ve done so far has been without fault. Fedex shipped overnight and I only received it yesterday morning.

Now I need to work on getting all the programs and miscellaneous other things back up and working on the new computer. I believe that I was able to save 90% of everything that was on the old laptop, transferring files to my external 500gb hard drive on the last remaining charge. At some point I need to either take apart the PowerBook and try to discern the cause for why it won’t charge, or source yet another charger to determine if it’s just that at fault. Either way, for now it’s deader than a door nail and laying on the floor by my desk. I’ve been tripping on it.

One quibble? I forgot when ordering that the new Macs don’t even include a telephone jack anymore. This means my pathetic dial-up at home is definitely on the way out.

To be replaced with a highly expensive cell plan and Droid smartphone. Oops, cat out of the bag for the next post’s subject? Unsure at the moment whether I’ll be going with Verizon, Sprint, or another company. They all seem prohibitively expensive, but for all of the useful purposes that a new Droid phone will function as, it seems like I’ll finally need to break down and get shackled to a 2-year phone contract. At least we won’t need to pay NetZero $15 a month for the worst imaginable internet experience, ever. I pray that tethering will have at least some semblance of being quicker.

Till the next one, faithful readers. (Yes, I know you all just arrived here with random Google queries, it’s O-K.)