[Previous entry: "Fuck the Republican Party"] [Next entry: "The terrorists win"]

11/04/2006: "Apple Doth Not (always) Suck"

music: David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel - Poison

So back on approximately October 6, I sold my 12" PowerBook G4 (which to my wife's physical therapist, to replace her aging Dell. She's delighted, and her kid's now call me the "Apple Man", so I'd guess they're delighted too.

Because nothing sucks so much as an aging Dell that runs XP.

We went on vacation (to the Big Island) the following week. I was notebook-free for a week, except for the Nokia 770. When we got back from vacation, the wife nearly insisted that I go buy a new MacBook. I was willing to wait it out, and see what Apple released before or at MacWorld, but she insisted. In fact, she took me to the Apple store, where I purchased a Core Duo Macbook Pro, and then bought me a very nice steak dinner at Morton's.

Its God-awful nice to be able to run a small Debian image in a Parallels VM while not having to deal with the (cough cough) "linux desktop". (Gag me.) I have to run linux and freebsd to get my work done, but I don't want to suffer with the egregeous hack they call Gnome. (KDE doth suck as well, though less so than Gnome.)

Less than a week later, Apple, with no fanfare or warning, upgraded the MacBook Pro from Core Dueo @ 1.83GHz to Core Duo 2 @ 2.16GHz (nearly 40% faster between the clockspeed bump and the faster internal architecture, while consuming less power), increased the standard drive size from 80MB to 120MB, the standard RAM size from 512MB to 1GB, silently added an 802.11n "Airport" card, and a host of other, more minor features.

So, after fretting about it for a bit, I finally decided to backup, wipe and re-package my original MBP and head back to ye olde Apple Store to see if they would do the right thing.

Short story, they did, and I am a very happy camper. They even gave me a new AppleCare subscription, since I'd already used the one I bought for the original MBP.

In-turn, I bought an identical model for my wife, to replace her "too heavy, too big" less than one year-old Dell notebook. Because there is nothing that sucks so much as an aging Dell running XP. (Also, the taxman cometh, and we buy the hardware for the company.)

Then I took the kid out for BBQ and flirted with a couple strippers who were sitting at the bar drinking Lemon Drops before heading across the street to work. The kid's name is "Hunter Speed", after all, so he'll have to know about these things sooner than you might expect.

As I speak, the backups are being restored, .Mac has synced in everything, and life is resuming on the new machine. And yes, it is way faster.

So, for all of you yahoos out there who complain about how Apple are stingy theives, or declare that "Apple Bites", here is a counter-example.

Not a bad night.