I was asked about part 2 of my account about life with a MacBook today, so I thought I should continue so as not to leave my reader(s) in suspense any longer. She actually longs for an Apple computer, but is not sure she wants to spend the extra money on it at this point in her young life. Life is short and she may be impatient to save the extra money, however, since life can be short do you want to spend it futzing with Windows?
According to a recent article at ComputerWorld "in the midrange, where lower-cost 13-in. LCD MacBook models occupy price ranges from about $1,100 to $1,500, you may be equally surprised. Apple's recently updated MacBooks (see the technical specs) more than hold their own on price/performance comparisons with other 12- and 13-in. LCD computers from Sony, Toshiba and HP."
The article continues to say the following:
The desktop landscape may also be an eye-opener. Even though the likes of Dell, HP, Sony and so on have machines priced from about $500 and up, those prices don't include LCDs (in most cases), and they don't start to get hardware-competitive with the processors in Apple's iMac line until they hit about $1,000.
Because of the iMac's built-in LCD, it's actually less expensive, though some of the details (such as hard drive size and RAM amount) may be tilted in favor of the Windows desktops. If you know your way around PCs and want some extras, the Apple could in some instances be the clear value leader in this category.
But I must confess when I was in my young twenties I opted for a 10Mhz KayPro IBM clone running DOS with dual 720 KB disk drives, 512 KB (that's KB not MB which was unheard of at the time) and a Hercules amber monochrome monitor, because although I preferred the graphical GUI white monochrome Mac, I could not afford it. I do not recall the price differences, but it was like comparing a Chevy to BMW.
Who knows where my life would have led if I had just waited a little longer and saved up for the Mac. I might have been on the forefront of desktop publishing, instead of playing with CorelDraw on Windows 3.0 creating files that the printer could not read which forced me to take them to a Mac service bureau where they transferred my files to a Mac and made the magic happen to create the proper film negatives the printer needed.
Let's pull off memory lane and get back to the present and talk about the Mac Migration Assistant. This clever little utility makes it a snap to transition from one Mac to another via a Firewire cable between the two. Everything is brought over from the old machine: bookmarks, email settings, documents, and applications. It did not work at first because there was an error on the G4 PowerBook's hard drive. There were some Thai or Vietnamese legal documents from Adobe with unusual characters in the file names. I could not even delete the files. They would go into the trash can, but could not be emptied. To resolve the situation I had to reboot from the System disk in the DVD drive and repair the disk. Afterwards the migration went smoothly and I was able to log into the new MacBook and be greeted with my old desktop.
There was only one application that did not behave well, Snapz Pro X, a screen capture program that is great for making screencasts, but it would not run properly. There were no errors, I just could not get it to capture the screen anymore. A Unversial version of the application does not exist yet. It was a demo, so I deleted it. Everything else runs fine including Microsoft Offce X. It's not a Universal application, but runs via the invisible Rosetta emulation software that allows G4 compiled applications to run on a Intel Processor.
I was going to describe Parallels, the software that allow syou to run Windows applications alongside Mac applications. It is an amazing piece of software, but it will have to wait until Part 3.
