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May 16, 2003

Back In Mac

The iBook's back home again. It seems the last repair they did on the display involved a part that proved defective after a few weeks of use, hence its sudden death three days ago. I took it to the shop on Tuesday, mildly bent out of shape, and got it back today. Between Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, it went to California, got fixed, and came back.

During the interim period, I was thinking pretty hard on the prospects of switching over to a clone laptop, but the research I did on the Dell Inspiron line and the IBM R-series ThinkPads told me the 800 and 900 MHz iBooks really are a pretty good deal compared to their competition in Wintel land. I'm guessing something like Photoshop is going to be faster on a ~1.5-2 GHz Mobile Celeron than it is on an 800-900 MHz G3, but not painfully so.

The deciding factor comes down to learning that I'll get a reasonable trade-in on the iBook at the local Mac store (maybe I'd be able to squeeze more out of eBay, but not by much) and realizing that I've got some dough tied up in software for OS X.

One other thing awaiting me when I fired up the newly repaired machine: Safari's nasty little SSL bug has been fixed.

Oh... it's also worth noting that sometime in the past few days the good folks at Ranchero kicked out the final 1.2 release of RSS reader titan NetNewsWire, which is bad only to the extent it makes it very easy to blow off sites that don't bother too syndicate in favor of the sheer pleasure of reading the ones that do with NNW's slicker'n snot interface. A few days away from NNW had me playing around with Amphetadesk, which is fine and all, but it felt like flint knives and bear hides compared to NNW.

Comments

Posted by: Sven at May 18, 2003 9:59 PM