Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Apples and more Apples

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that Apple Computer, Inc. must be putting something in the water. A year or so ago, having had a quick ogle at my brothers' machine at Christmas, I bought my first Mac - an 800MHz iBook. It's a lovely machine - well-designed, robust to the point of being usable for bludgeoning irate bears if the need arises, nice interface, more ports than you can shake a stick at, and (best of all, naturally) the power plug has a bi-colour LED to indicate whether the machine's fully charged or not.

A year later and, well, I'm surrounded by Macs both at work and at home. The most recent addition came a couple of days ago - as threatened in a previous entry, I gave in a couple of weeks ago, broke into my savings account and am now the proud owner of a G5 PowerMac. A dual-processor 1.8GHz machine, to be precise, and it's wonderful in more or less every way, not to mention ridiculously fast. Part of my justification for going for a well-specced machine rather than something like an iMac is that I want it to have a good few years of staying power, but I have to be honest and say that another part of the justification is that it's simply a beautiful piece of hardware.

A sizable proportion of high-end PC enthusiasts consider garish displays of coloured lights, illuminated cables and perspex windows with Linux penguins etched into them to be the epitome of high style. I've always seen this as the computing equivalent of a Vauxhall Nova with a bolt-on spoiler, side skirts and a sound system that's designed more for bass reproduction that anything else - you know, the cars you can see cruising up and down suburban high streets across the country while their occupants pretend they look really cool. The G5, however, simply looks powerful, and happily, it is. It's also one of the most beautiful machines I've ever seen inside, with a clean and virtually cable-free interior that's a work of art in itself. Is it any surprise that Apple have made the plastic baffle that covers the insides to control airflow transparent, so people can run their machines with the side panels off?

There is so much that's right about Apple's machines that I could keep yakking on about it for hours, but just to mention one, I have to say that Firewire Target Disk Mode is one of the most useful things ever invented.