Since Steve Jobs' return to Apple, just about everything surrounding the company, in my opinion, has moved towards the ideal. The iMac was introduced, for one. Here's an extremely powerful, consumer machine that is possessing of excellent industrial design (inspiring the reaction of "MAN that's fine! I want one! What is it?") and an excellent price. And now you can get it for $1/day. Genius. Apple's production methods have been improved as well, yielding a "closer to the bone" degree of excess warehoused hardware than any other computer manufacturer. There's also MacOS X in the not-so-distant future--the elegance of the MacOS with the raw power and robustness of the NeXTSTEP's Mach kernel underneath. Being an OS enthusiast/collector, it's hard not to get extrelemy excited about that, alone. But it's all of these things that have convinved me that Apple is going to be a major player in the years to come, and I've decided that I want in on that. All of these things have come together in such a way as to leave me no alternative but to assess them with only one descriptive phrase: insane fine. There are only several machines that I've considered, officially, insane fine in the past--the first Mac, the first Amiga, the NeXT machines, and I believe the Apple Newton MessagePad 2000. But now, with the release of the iMac last year and the recent release of the "blue&white" Power Macintosh G3, I belive that Apple is, again, producing this sort of greatness.

The whole situation that I've described in the preceeding paragraph explains why I decided, in late August I believe it was, to make the switch to the Mac when the new, slotted Professional Macintosh was released. Codename Yosemite with the beautiful El Capitan case design, these machines are awesome. I waited about four and a half months until I was finally able to order one (from the Apple Store the first day it was available, Jan. 6, 1999). The system I ordered is a 400MHz build-to-order unit. See the bottom of this page for the current specs of the sytstem. I figure if you're going to make the plunge, you may as well do it right.

       The system I'm coming from is an Intel-compatible K6-233 based system. (You can see the specs for it and the other ~40 systems I've been through over the past 17 years--started when I was 10--right here.) That was not, by any means, a slow machine, but I knew that coming to a high-end Power Mac would give me increased performance. I just didn't know that it would be quite this much of a performance increase (think Unreal)!! I don't mean simply more raw processing power at my disposal, but it's that power along with the capapbilities provided by the hardware and software (OS and applications) that are available to me, that make this such a nice system to own and use. And that's only considering the current MacOS 8.5.1. I've got MacOS 8.6, MacOS X, MacOS X Server, and LinuxPPC coming down the road, all of which end up on this system and all of which will offer me more and more functionality. It's nice to be aware that over the next year or so, it will be like I'm getting a new computer with new capabilities a number of times. (Versus sitting still on Win98 or NT.)