I have bowed to the inevitable, and bought a Great Big Expensive Mac Pro.  This is a dual quad-core machine, and I just got an extra 4 gigs of RAM from Crucial (NOT the Mac store – their prices are nothing short of absurd) so that I can really work on post-production on my short film.

It struck me that every computer I’ve bought has been about 10x as fast as the previous machine.  My first computer was the old TRS-80, with 4K (later 16k) of RAM.  Programs were loaded in via a cassette tape drive, and later we all freaked out when there were actual floppy disks.  Which, back then, were really floppy – the 5 1/4 size, and the big TRS disks were about 8 inches across. 

Yes, children, you’re reading that right. Shut up and go play with your terabyte iTouches.

Next, was a PC-AT that sped along at 4.77 mHz. This had dual disk drives, and a sickly green monochrome display.  My sister Sara and I played some kind of lame "Adventure" game on it for hours and hours, wandering around in a lame dungeon and shooting arrows into green slimy blobs.

In the early 90s, I made the decision to go whole hog to the PC platform – at the time, a Mac SE30 was about the size of a boom box, a monochrome screen the size of my hand, and a tiny 30 meg hard disk.  By comparison, my old Zeos desktop had 4 megs of RAM, a 120 meg hard drive and a 14" color display.  Whee!

I still remember the cover of the old PC Magazine, back when the mag was fat as a phone book with all the clone makers who had been unleashed on the landscape, packing the mag with ads … the big splash headline said: "25 Megahertz Screamers Unleashed."

Yeah, a lot of things are quaint in retrospect.

Next, in ’98, I got a Dell laptop that ran at 233 mHz.  This had a 3 gig hard drive and could actually connect to the internet. 

In ’02, I got the Fry’s Electronics desktop – 2.53 gHz, 120 gig hard drive, dual DVD drives.

This Octocore has 8 cores, all running at 3 gHz, which specs out to 32 gHz.  The hard drive is a puny 250 gigs, but I have a gigabit connection to my NAS (which has decided this week to play nice with the rest of the network), and a Superdrive.  I’m still trying to reconcile myself to the change in the way that I navigate around from program to program, and I am really hating not being able to use my keyboard (typing on a regular keyboard hurts like a bitch after about 5 minutes – I need the split keyboard because of my 2XL hand size). 

Still, Vista had made my life into such a living hell for the last year that I could not in good conscience keep banging my head against the wall. The crashes, the constant updates, the security holes, the unexplained way that multimedia content JUST WOULDN’T WORK no matter what I did …

If I am going to actually produce video content for the web, I need something that actually works.  Vista did not.  It just didn’t.  I spent hours and hours on the phone with customer service reps who painfully tried to walk me through all the steps to troubleshoot Vista, and on more than one occasion, they just threw up their hands and said, "Well, we don’t know."

That can’t happen.

Or, when I was doing a presentation in Cucuta, I arrived in front of a room full of expectant journalists, tried to fire up my machine … only to stand there, sweating, in dismay, as the computer took more than 25 minutes to install what Microsoft called "Critical updates."  For 25 minutes, the screen was blank as the disk light just lit up and kept on, and I head the clicking and grinding from inside the Vaio (and don’t get me started about the for-shit quality of the hard disks in the Vaio). 

You try standing in front of a room that’s expecting to see demonstrations of how multimedia can change their lives when your computer won’t even wake up and there is no way to make it work. 

So I have embarked on this adventure with the Mac. It is my hope that I can learn how to deal with all the quirks and differences with the Mac fast enough so that my productivity doesn’t take a massive hit.  So far, I am not encouraged.  Despite the promises of how the Mac makes things so easy, it is impossible to add a printer in any way that makes the slightest bit of sense to me.