Of Macs and Men

Whenever we visit Ginza, we always drop by the Apple Store. There, you can check the latest products and try them out. I love the latest notebooks specially the black 13" MacBook with a widescreen aspect ratio. I wish I have a penny for each of the things I want, but here in Tokyo where space is a premium, you can only have one (or two?) of them at a time. I am seriously considering ditching Yuki, my Athlon PC running Win2k, to make space for an Apple computer but I don't have a new home for her yet. I think I should ship her to Laguna but I have taken good care of her that parting with her will not be easy. And besides, she's got choice parts when I built her a good five years ago. She is sexy in the all-aluminum case, with a 500 watt power supply. I have not replaced a single part since I built her and I only re-built her OS once in her first year. Recently, Win2k support has been discontinued such that I have not been getting anymore OS update. This means, her OS is now officially, frozen in time, waiting to be euthanized when no more new software will be compatible out-of-the-box for her to run. Consider the latest digital cameras and mobile phones. The latest of these gadgets are no longer supported directly so I had to use a cheap flash card reader if I need to upload pictures. Going back to Macs, I thought I should get a Mac mini instead so that I can still use the monitor and the keyboard, and ship only Yuki's brain out but I read somewhere Mac minis are no-brainers but the next option is a PowerMac which I think is too costly for my own purposes as most of the time I will only be using her for no-brainer tasks like emailing and browsing porn so it wont really matter that much if I use a mini. Add to that the fact that it's simply too bulky for Tokyo reality. I may decide yet, when Leopard starts shipping.

The truth is, for a year now, I had been itching to give Yuki a make-over. I have not built a new PC for over five years and new technologies have been around and old ones that she was built upon have been obsoleted. I need to to be able to feel the new hardware whenever I click the mouse or save a file. But Yuki has been performing well. She has been hit by a few worms before that I had to remove manually and she always came out less and less prone to infection with every OS updates, maybe because the worm-making industry had shifted its effort to XP a few years ago. Since she has continued to give good service, I intend to reward her by not upgrading any of her parts and OS until they're really broken. I reckon I can still get good service for a few more years without breakage but Apple is really dishing out good arguments for it. The only complaint I have for Yuki is that she is a little bit noisy, with her three fans. (She has five but I disabled the two.) Well, let's wait a few more months then...