It’s been an Apple-tastic year of hardware for me, as I added a good amount of Job-sean computing power:
- Starting work at LOLapps, I asked for a behemoth of a laptop, the 17″ Macbook Pro. It turns out web development work is well-suited for the mac.
- I wanted a home media server; the Mac Mini made sense given its sexy form factor and reasonable price.
- The iPhone 3GS was a natural upgrade from the OG iPhone.
- And I just got another Macbook Pro for personal use.
Am I just another inductee into the Apple cult?
I decided I wanted another laptop. When Sui’s elbow jabbed me in the stomach for the umpteenth time while she shrank in the home office chair as I reached around to type in a chat IM window aside her email screen, I figured having two machines around would be helpful, and it’d quiet down my constantly-whirring, energy-sucking beast of a PC periodically.
And after spending some time with Macbooks in the office, well – why not. Macs worked well for development (say, when I’m working from home), I’m growing used to the OSX programs and interface, and the Macbook Pro really has exceptional build quality.
And all I needed was:
And I get this crappy iPhone camera pic:
Now all I need is one of my wealthier friends to donate a productivity-busting 30″ screen.
It was the sound of mating mice which alerted me to something wrong.
Fortunately, I didn’t have a rat infestation problem. What I did have sounded like a hard drive on its last legs, grinding out the reminder of its 1′s and 0′s as diligently as a half-dead piece of machinery could. A few minutes more, the operating system would finally play heed to its requiem and terminate the farce, freezing my machine in the middle of an online game.
It’s always in the middle of game.
When we last left off, I was busy prying open my new Mac Mini to get at its deliciously compact innards with a screwdriver and putty knife. Opening up and messing with the internals of the Mini is much more annoying than it should be, but I was able to shove two new sticks of RAM and a new hard drive in the machine with minimal warranty-voiding destruction.
With it finally sitting attractively underneath the TV, I spent some time upgrading it into an actual useful media box befit of the pedigree looming overhead. It’s still a work-in-progress, but the requirements for a living room media center running OSX are a bit different from the workstation/gaming PC setups I’m used to:
Through my television’s tenure, it has done little else beyond displaying PS3 and XBox 360 games in glorious high definition. I tried cable at one point, but canceled it from inactivity; it’s not that I don’t want to watch cable and shows, but the few which are interesting aren’t worth the $50 or so a month.
Then internet video came along, and all anybody needed to access content – for free! – was something with a web browser and video output. Unfortunately, not many machines have both a decent web browser and outputs to a TV, and it turns out the simplest solution is to just hook up a fully-featured desktop ().
I was going to type up a short post on some rather badly taken pictures of my new computer parts; I upgraded my computer recently, and a few friends asked for specs and pics:
It was a long-overdue upgrade; I have a fairly recent graphics card, but coupled with a CPU four years young, the card’s graphical prowess had been going to waste. With four cores and more RAM, this machine’s has been making Vista 64-bit fly.
As a matter of fact, it was surprisingly easy to put the parts together, and every time I build a box it seems like the manufacturers take the time to put in additional labels or helpful hinges to make the process as simple as possible. If only they’d stop making new standards on connectors every few years to force customers to buy adapters or shiny new gadgets.
You’d think that software – especially free software – would avoid these hardware follies.