So, I went shopping last night. A little. Kinda what used to be called browsing, back before that involved Exploder or Firefox or Chrome—even back before it involved Netscape, in fact. But anyway....

In looking around at stuff, I wound up back in the glossy section of MicroCenter, looking at Apple stuff.

Not technically my idea, of course. MondoHebe was there, and looking to upgrade—that might be the wrong word; really, he's looking to utterly replace this prehistorical Dell thing he got for about fifty bucks when his actual computer, currently about five years old and sitting in my diningroom while we try to figure out what's wrong with it, went all wonky. Of course, since he's seen me do everything from CG in LightWave to webtoons in Flash to integration in Premiere, and he's on the verge of figuring out PowerPoint, he's interested in getting something capable of doing some basic videowork. The guy pulls him back into the glossy section to show him the Macs. So I went along.

...and then a 4bit greenscreened CRT monitor/// goes above this.

Now. Let's cover the backstory a bit. I know a little about Apple. The first computer I had [I can't quite decide between saying bought and built, since that was kinda the same verb back then] was the screamingly amazing apple][plus of 1979. Seriously. It was remarkably cool. Because, apart from my heavily modified supercomputer [I installed the 80column card doubling the resolution, and doing just about exactly what it sounds like: kicking up the characters allowed per line from forty to eighty; try grasping that, My Tweeps], I was pretty well surrounded by adding machines. Meaning purely hardware clockwork abaci operating by some steampunk magic—presumably clunking through User Hit 1, then 3, then 7, then Minus, then 4, and typewritering out something like this:

1
+ 3
+ 7
- 5
= 6

So, the Apple's relentless dekaflops were simply way cool. Not denying that. I've even still got the thing here somewhere.

A few years later, I kicked up to the CommodoreSX-64 laptop of 1983 [yeah: really] and kinda ignored the Apple for pretty much ever.

At this point, I get into this geneological warfare thing for a while. The SX-64 leads to the Amiga500; the apple][plus leads to the MacIIx; the Amiga500 leads to the Amiga4060T; the IIx leads to the iMac. And, the world designed to infuriate me, all that leads to the twenty-first century, and I give up entirely and go all Wintel for a while.

Okay: so I left a few steps out. I was playing with Wintel in 1991 with this Toshiba laptop, after dicking around with the PCjr friends had back in the eighties. But none of that's really worth talking about.

So. I've been sticking to Wintel [to simplify, we'll allow that a Windoze machine based around the AMD64 I've got in this tower can be called Wintel] for the last decade or so, while various people who don't quite seem stupid are plinking away on MacBooks across the table from my Asus701 and HP7140US and WindozeMobile SmartPhone and...everything I've got is Wintel, because I gave up on the minorities ever doing more than playing bullshit elitist games with me. Incidentally, the release of the iPhone reaffirmed that all to hell, and I'm still blaming the shit outta that. Even if, really, it was probably more AT&T's incompetent fault.

But now it's 2009. And just only. I've got perishable food around here expected to be edible in 2010. And so I'm back in the glossy section, looking at the uppity competition for the first time in...a while.

Meaning of course really looking at it. Because, for the last ten years since that iMac happened to me, about all I've seen is John McClaine's kid pretending to be a Mac [Remember how my first Apple was in 1979? Remind me how that makes Justin Long as a Mac younger than the Microsoft1980 computer], and I'd really stopped listening to their forced selfdeprecating monologues by the time one mentioned that Macs could run Microsoft Word. Mostly because: who cares; so can my phone.

So the thing I missed in all that was BootCamp. And I shouldn't have missed that. Because I did the same damned thing in 1994, shapeshifting my A4060T to run Windoze3.11 and report back that it was hovering at 4GHz. Then I blew out the grid, since twenty gigs of EDO RAM uses a hell of a lot of electricity. But anyway....

Fifteen years later, I'm in the glossy section, hearing that, apart from Microsoft Word, the new Macs will simply run Windoze. Which even now sounds like something of a bad thing, except that I already stocked up on Windoze shit [technically, I only tolerate Microsoft Word, and still really miss the Amiga's FinalWriter] because Commodore died out and an iMac happened to me. So, hearing that a Mac can now be infected by Windoze, I'm listening for more information.

And more geneology. Here's a Mac the size of a laptop and the price of a decent jacket, but without a screen; it's just this little lump called a MacMini. Not real interested. And here's the MacPro for the price of a severely used car, and arguably classed as a new order of intelligence. That's better. And here's the new MacBookPro in the middle, for $2499 [less than the average I've spent on laptops since 1983] at the mass of the lump with approximately the power of the tower; and here's what that does; and what it does is really kinda cool.

So, I didn't buy one. Thought about it; didn't. Still might; haven't. Partly because an iMac happened to me; largely because I don't like rewarding smugness. Slightly because I'm not even sure I've got three thousand bucks laying around at the moment; I'm recessionproofed in that I can't get fired or go into the red, but I still kinda rely on people who can, and then can't buy books and shirts and things; for all I know, the twenty bucks in my pocket is all I've got right now.

See what I did there? I'm trying to sympathise with people. Because I really just don't give a damn about money. Ever.

So. Probably I'll grab one of these laptops. Because it really is kinda cool. BootCamp aside, looking at the thing, it really looks like someone at Apple got this kooky idea to take every good thing about AmigaOS [also known as Linux and Unix and so on] and jam it into twenty-first-century technology. Which I'd been kinda counting on; I'd just been hoping that AmigaTechnologies might remember to exist and make that happen first.

But there's still that annoying part to it. The Mactivists. I hate those people. They remind me of any given conspiratard who, after misguessing for twenty years, accidentally trip close to a hunch that maybe the Federal Reserve is a problem, thus proving to themselves, and really out loud, that the moonlandings were faked to get Elvis off the planet after he shot JFK from the grassy knoll with technology stolen from the friendly greys who crashed in Roswell. The goofs using Macs before, during, and since that iMac disaster have no supportable claims, even today. Because they told me the iMac was a good thing.

So now I've got this sorta ethical dilemma in which I'm acknowledging that the ProBook thing seems to be good, allowing that it's comparatively free against the $7,999 1991 Toshiba 80286, has keys that light up, and gets recommended by the sort of 'tard known for recommending the damned iMac in the nineties. I'm trying to decide whether getting a Mac in any way resembles conceding that Mactivists might not be utter fanboy fucktards. Because I'm not gonna concede that. Because iMac.

Also, I might only have twenty bucks. Which isn't that bad, since it's still more than an iMac's worth.

I dunno. I've got the one thing to fall back on, I suppose. To the extent that the ProBook thing is something of an expertlevel iPhone, I can reasonably assume that, by waiting a little longer, I could hold out for the next model, which'll be faster and lighter and longer on batterylife and have a touchscreen.

Seriously. As cool as the thing is, it somehow lacks a touchscreen. And this is factoring that, for fifty bucks, I could hit DealExtreme.com and buy an aftermarket touchscreen for any computer I have here. Maybe I could do that for a Mac. But who cares: it should have a touchscreen. So, at the least, I'm gonna wait for that. Damnit.

But then, yeah: I'll probably give in and get one. One last time.

Unless it actually doesn't suck. In that case, I might get the first of many.

More later....

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