iMac

Over the last week I dipped my toes back into Apple world. I briefly played around with the Mac G4 Cube back in 2000. The main draw at the time was it's heritage. Since my college days I was a big fan of the amazingly powerful (if commercially an amazing flop) NeXT Computer. The new G4 Cube was one of the first machines released by Apple with their new OS, heavily based on the NeXTStep OS. Having many other irons in the fire at the time, and the cube being a bit underpowered and feature weak, the cube languished.

Fast forward 8 years. Having followed the ongoing development of all thing Mac in the Tech Press, and the positive experiences of several friends (Hat tip to Charles F. & Dave H.), after weeks of internal debate I went into the local Apple store and picked up one of the new 20-inch, 2.66GHz, 2GB Ram iMacs. I was originally only going to pick up one of the small Mac-Mini machines to 'play around with'. But the mad angel managed to "up sell" me into a nicer iMac. "You'll quickly feel constrained and wish you'd bought the bigger one. Then you'll buy the bigger one and this one will sit. So you're getting off cheaper by just buying the bigger one now" she said. How could I say no when faced with such logic?

So I picked up the iMac and a copy of VMWare (to allow me to run windows or other operating systems in a virtual machine on my iMac) and am now in the process of migrating my Home Business functions off of my TC1100 Tablet onto the the Mac. The VMWare will help me avoid having to purchase Mac specific versions of some software for a bit (Quickbooks, Quicken Business Law and my Tax advisor software being my most important apps). I'm not sure I'm going to be willing to pay the cost of a Mac specific license of Office anytime soon.

I had originally planned to clone the drive on my Tablet and run it as a Virtual Machine under VMWare so I could avoid the hassle of reinstalling all the software. The cloning process was very easy (though it did take time to clone a 30Gig drive into a 19Gig image and copy it over to the Mac) and the virtual Tablet XP image quickly booted and was prompting me for login on. HOWEVER, once logged-in Microsoft's activation prompt came up telling me I had to activate this version of windows. Apparently Windows noticed the change from the original CPU on the Tablet to my virtualized CPU and wont activate unless I call Microsoft. Ugh! So I've still got to sort that out. But it looks like I may have to dig up a new license of XP to install on the Mac. Additionally, I've had a failure of my wireless mouse. But AppleCare support is shipping me a replacement over the next few days. So I'm using another USB mouse for the time being.

All that said, I've been happy thus far with the new Mac. Very robust, very stable, lots of interesting features. And of course the OS is Unix based. I think the general home and business-use transition will be a non-event. However, I still have my high powered PC Gaming Machine. I am told VMWare does very well to allow you to play PC games but I've obviously not tried that yet