Geoff Arnold

My first laptop...

I've just bought my first laptop. No, of course it isn't the first laptop that I've used: over the last 13 years* I've worked with countless systems from various vendors (IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Sharp, Apple, and Acer) in a variety of form factors (from desktop replacements to pocket-sized subnotebooks). But all of them - even the little Toshiba Libretto - were bought by Sun for me to use, and their hard disks have been filled with the documents, software, tools, and other materials that I work with on a daily basis.

As I spend a lot of my time travelling, I find that my laptop does double duty. Yes, it's a business tool - but it's also where I transfer digital photographs when my camera is full; where I store the music that I listen to on the road; and how I watch DVDs in the airport or in my hotel room. This is simply a practical matter: I'm hardly going to carry two laptops with me, one for work and one for personal use. But as a result I've found recently that more and more of the hard disk space on my laptop was being occupied by personal materials - music, videos, photographs, DVD projects - that have nothing to do with Sun.

So what was I to do? I'm committed to helping my colleagues to make Solaris 10 an excellent laptop OS (for which I use my Acer Ferrari), but I have to recognize that my personal multimedia data is tied to Apple's iLife application suite. So I started to think about getting myself a laptop for both work and personal use. This principled approach was nudged along by practical considerations: my existing PowerBook (a 12" 867MHz G4 with 640MB/60GB) was starting to feel really slow: start-up time for some of the big apps like NeoOffice/J was getting painful.

So this evening I visited the Apple store up the road and paid in cold, hard plastic for the first laptop I've owned: a 15" PowerBook (1.67GHz G4, 1GB/80GB). The migration tool worked perfectly: I strung a Firewire cable between the old Powerbook ("medieval") and the new ("silk"), rebooted medieval in target disk mode, and it sucked everything over - user info, documents, applications, network settings.

And yes, I did buy AppleCare extended warranty. Nobody's perfect.

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* I think that the first was an IBM Thinkpad 700, back in 1992.

On being a True Believer...

James Lileks, on how owning the latest gear from Apple makes you... well, better: cool, more hip, just a superior kind of human being. But as he admits "On the other hand, I must be honest. Those of us who are true Apple devotees will buy almost anything they make. We know it, and we don't care. If they came out with an iPod RiceGrain that was implanted under your skin and played six notes, I'd buy it."