Tuesday, August 2, 2005

The darkest day in my history with computers
Yes, indeed. I enrolled today and got my iBook G4.

The hardware:
30GB storage. 512MB ram with a laughable 1.07Ghz processor, so it's basically like a military-trained guard dog on a 2-foot chain.

Delightfully large mouse trackpad, with an unnecessarily and awkwardly large mouse button. (ONE BUTTON, in case you forgot.) Full-size keyboard.

The CD player is like what you would find in a car, where you just slide it in. Pretty cool, but whenever I insert or eject a CD, it makes a horrible crunching noise. I think one day it will succumb to temptation and devour one of my CD's as soon as I put it in, and when I eject it out will pop a filth-covered copy of U2's "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb".

The OS:
I've never really made any serious stabs at OSX before, because I hadn't ever used it and I'd rather keep my hatred of Macintosh completely justified.

Those days, however, are over. I'm using 10.3 (the latest version, I'm told), and I haven't seen more back-to-back violations of common sense since... actually, I don't think anything tops OSX. The entire system is apparently based around trying to get as close to the functionality of Windows (i.e., not quite unbearable) as possible, while screwing it up enough that it's not noticeable.

My favorite (and most overused) example of this is the mouse button. They know that having two buttons is far superior, but they don't want to bow down and admit that they were wrong on even one issue. So they incorporate an alternate click, but you have to hold Ctrl+click to access it. Tried to do what Windows does, but made it suck enough that it's obscure.

The Software:
The only programs of much note that it came with were Microsoft Office: Mac Edition (once again...), Firefox, IE and iLife, which is the name that the balding, 40-year-old marketing executives at Macintosh came up with to describe iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD, GarageBand, etc.

iTunes is actually a pretty decent program, from what I can tell so far. Nothing special, but decent.

GarageBand is also surprisingly good, once you get into it. It's a basic music creation tool that actually reveals its self to be fairly customisable. I'll probably be using it a good bit.

Firefox and IE seem to screw up a bit (in fact, IE won't even pull up), but that could be because of a number of things. I can't even log into myOtaku on there yet. Besides that, they're still made all the worse for being on a Mac.

And of course, I can't download hardly any other programs because nothing on the internet is Mac-compatible.

But hey, I'll still have my home computer as soon as it gets fixed. And speaking of, the guy who's fixing it says he's going to go ahead and upgrade it for us. Yay!
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