View From the Bushes

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but deep in my heart of hearts when it comes to computers, I'm basically an Apple man. Linux is great for servers, but when you're talking about sitting down in front of something and working for 14 hours straight, it just doesn't get much better than an Apple 23" Cinema Display hooked to a Power Mac Dual 2 GHz G5. Of course, I don't have one of these awesome machines. In fact, my primary computer at home is an AMD/Windows machine. For a variety of reasons it's a lot cheaper, mostly due to the fact that since I work from home on occasion, the company I work for covers the cost of most of the Microsoft products on my machine (mostly the OS and Office), which saves me a huge amount right off the bat. And then, of course, there are the games...

Up until when I recently played Neverwinter Nights, I really hadn't played any games for about two years. And even Neverwinter Nights has recently been made available for the Mac, but the idea that if I saw a really cool game and couldn't play it disturbs me on an almost reptilian level. In fact, even as we speak, Bioware is producing a game called Jade Empire which appears to only be available on an XBox, which lead me to not-so-innocently ask my wife when we should get the kids a gaming console. To which she replied, "Not before they ask for one!" I suppose she has a point. In any case, probably more than any other single factor, it's the games that keep me from buying a Mac.

Now, if I had enough money to have a "work" computer and a game computer (like some of my friends), then I would definitely have both, but at this point I can really only justify having one computer. I got started thinking about this whole subject when a MacWarehouse catalog showed up in my mailbox today. Out of curiousity, I went to apple.com to see what my dream machine would cost. As it turns out, only around $12,400. Okay, that's a lot, though $5000 of that is getting 8 gigs of ram, another $2000 is the 23" monitor, plus tossing in the 40 gig iPod, and a dozen different add-ons wasn't cheap either. Of course, just the basic dual processor G5 is $3000, which is more than the car I'll probably be buying over the weekend.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross