Shinies
Why does new tech have to be so cool?
I’m looking at MacBook Pros again, and it’s not doing anything wonderful for my wallet. I found Apple’s resale section on their store and they’re offering refurbished MacBook Pros at a $300 discount. That seems pretty good; the student discount, however, is $200 already, so I don’t know if buying refurbished for $100 less is better than spending an extra $100 to get a new product.
Now, if the two discounts could be combined, that’d be awesome.
I started looking into productivity suites for Mac, which is an area that I always feel Mac is sort of lacking in when compared to Windows. Although Mac lets you make really pretty stuff, I never feel like you can leverage any really advanced or powerful features in the basic programs without upscaling to some massive behemoth of an application. Looking at the components in iWork, however, it seems like some of that is changing.
Pages is pretty nice looking from the tutorial videos I watched. I like that it can function as both a word processor like Word, and also as a layout designer like InDesign.
Keynote is probably my favorite application from the suite. For some reason, I’m a real presentation whore, so I love applications that let you make really fancy looking presentations. I especially love the slide transitions. Even though I’m usually not one for slide transitions when making presentations, I really like some of the 3D motion ones in Keynote.
Numbers seems a little limited in functionality from what I’ve read. It apparently doesn’t do so good when it comes to number crunching and equations and graphs and stuff, despite its name. You can make really pretty looking spreadsheets and tables, but features for regression, curve-drawing, and other such data munging tools seem to be missing.
One of my favorite features in Powerpoint is “Smart Art”. These are basically fancy little charts and visuals that you can use to spice up presentation of blocks of text. You get basic things like pyramids, flowcharts, and Venn diagrams, but also fancy little visual metaphors like interlocking gears, filters, and rising arrows. I like inserting them all over the place.
So I could, theoretically, afford one of these MacBook Pro things. I do have enough money. I’m trying to decide whether or not, should I buy one, I would still use Windows at all. I’m not really sure that I actually would. Currently, I keep Windows around because I like being able to play CoH and have been teaching myself C# which needs .NET.
And, of course, there’s my Zune. Which is a significant incentive to stick with Windows, at least as a partition. There does seem to be prior art relating to the successful installation and operation of the new Zune software and devices using VMware and Parallels, which is heartening. I wonder why Microsoft doesn’t make Mac versions of the Zune software. It doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, but then again, Microsoft has never been one for compatibility.
The gang seems to have altogether dropped CoH. I barely ever solo anymore. Pat doesn’t play and neither does Jon, as far as I can tell. Adam is always prodding to play, but we never do. I guess my main reason for losing interest is that I have a level 50 character on both sides, so there’s no real incentive for me to play anymore. While I do like the story and like playing, if no one else is really playing anymore I don’t want to be playing alone.
As far as C# goes, I could always keep learning with Mono. The only problem is of course that Mono doesn’t fully implement .NET and only implements the free features of C#. For me, the most significant hole in Mono’s implementation is the lack of WPF and the .NET 3.5 features. Which I guess means that I would need to keep Windows around if I wanted to be able to play with those.
The bottom line is that I would be loathe to turn a new MacBook Pro into a PC by slapping Vista or XP on it and shunning OS X completely. However, I feel like it’s sort of a waste to dual boot with Boot Camp just for the Zune. I would sort of be tempted to just bite the bullet and get an iPod so I wouldn’t have to bother. Virtualization seems to be a good option, but I don’t know if hardware compatibility is what it needs to be. I would assume it is, as I would be paying $79.99 for VMware, which leads me to believe that they would at least make an effort to make sure that you have features like full USB 2.0 compatibility.
Argh, I hate technology. Why can’t we all just get along?
Getting a new Dell is the other option. I’m not entirely adverse to it, but I do really like Leopard, now that the kinks are finally being ironed. A new Dell would be several hundred dollars cheaper than the low-end MacBook Pro, depending on how I configure it, so that’s another plus. The only real minus that sticks in my mind is that the Dell laptops aren’t particularly visually striking. That is, I don’t really like the way they look because they look rather common. Apple’s designs are always elegant and eye-catching in their simplicity, which is what I love about the MacBook Pro. Also, the Dells are significantly larger and heavier than the MacBook Pros, which makes me much less wont to carry one around with me, which is something that I want to start doing with my laptop.
I think my main issue here is that I don’t want my digital life to be separated between to disconnected units. I want to be able to use all the applications I want to use from a single OS, be that Windows, OS X, or Linux. I also have this real predilection for “native” applications, which always makes me skirt workarounds like virtualization or emulation. It also leads to a lot of weird software choices, especially when there are clearly better alternatives.
Viz: I love Firefox. I know for a fact that it is probably the best browser out there. I’ve tried Opera, and while I like it a lot, I still like Firefox more because of its multitude of extensions. Despite that, I tend to find myself testing other browsers anyway, and trying to rationalize using them over the beloved Fox. On Ubuntu, I tried my best to like Epiphany; on Windows, I have tried my best to like IE7 and gave it a fair chance to sway me. Why? Epiphany integrates more closely with the Gnome desktop, notably taking its icon theme from Gnome’s settings and using GTK+ widgets where it can. It’s the same story with IE7.
Were I to switch to Mac, I would undoubtedly find myself wanting to use Safari or Camino instead of Firefox, Pages and Keynote instead of Office, and iTunes instead of the Zune player. And keeping a piece of software like the Zune player around for the sole purpose of synching music to the Zune and not playing it seems silly. I really wish Microsoft would make a Mac version of the Zune software.
I need to start figuring out what I’m going to be doing for the summer. I’m considering asking Jon to get me a job at USGS. This is mainly because I have heard good things about the job, that it is not stressful, and that it pays a government salary which is really nice. I am also considering going back to Music@Menlo, although I’m not really sure if that’s something I really want to do. While I would like to work with Sadie again, I’m not sure if I would actually enjoy doing the whole festival a second time. Even if my pay were doubled.
