Mostly Harmless

This post was originally going to have a nice little table comparing my current Mac to my potential new Mac with a feature by feature rundown showing how much faster and neater the new Mac would be, but, since I’ve just agreed to sell my current Mac to my boss and have already placed my order for the new Mac at the Apple Store I guess I’ll just give a quick overview.

• Old Mac: G3/350, 512 megs o’ RAM, ZIP, DVD, ATI Rage 128 video (PCI slot), 6 gig and 27 gig drive (keeping the 27)
• New Mac: G4/733, 128 megs (extra 512 is in the mail), CD-RW, GeForce2 MX (4X AGP), 60 gig drive.

I decided to skip on the combo DVD/CD-RW because: (a) I can play DVDs on my TV via the S-video out on the PowerBook, (2) for $150 I can buy a "real" DVD player, (c) the combo drive burns CDs at 8x, the CD-RW does 12x. I bumped the HD up to 60 gigs ‘cuz the 40 gig was 5,400 RPM; the 60 is 7,200 RPM (so it’s 50% bigger and 33% faster).

When everything’s installed in the new Mac I’ll have 640 megs of RAM and 87 gigs of drive space, the ability to turn the Mac into a wireless base station, much better video performance (with the ability to upgrade to a GeForce 3), gigabit ethernet (which wins me nuthin’, basically, but it’s there), and a CPU that’s minimally twice as fast (maximally about 50x faster on AltiVec-type stuff) and on a faster bus.

To sum up: this afternoon I spent $2k online. I justify the expense thusly: I was going to spend $800 on the old machine anyway (upgrade + CD-RW), which would then be near the end of it’s upgrade path; the new Mac will be 1/2 paid for within a week and completely paid for by other money coming in over the next month or two, not counting my paycheck; and, basically, I kinda wanted a new machine, so there.