Tag Archives: Powerbook 150

Apple, Where’s The Love?

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So I bought a new MacBook Pro. My old MacBook was starting to lag a bit and was so tattered and battered that it started to become a bit of an embarassement.It now rests in the office and is working diligently as backup storage and media server. To get the new MacBook, all I had to do was walk into the Apple Store in that monstrosity that is Westfield Stratford, tell the nice polish store assistant what I wanted, gave her my credit card and, fuuump, 2 minutes later I was walking out of the store, schlepping a nice new computer. Of course I could have ordered the beast to be delivered, but as the bloody mall is literally on my way home, this was much better.

Now, rewind to 1998. In my 5th year as an Apple owner, my main machine was a Power Mac 7100, a painfully slow G3 PowerPC based, ugly as hell beige brick that I was immensely proud of. To acquire such machines (and remember, this is year 4 of the web) you would have to search for the hidden 5 or 6 Apple dealer around the country (or, in my case, search for the even more obscure used Apple dealers). On top of that, I still had a Powerbook 165 lying around (with a 68040 chip!), a Macintosh IIfx and a Powerbook 150. All computers that were terribly slow and rather ugly compared to the then (comparatively) blindingly fast PCs. But as an Apple owner you would sneer and get a rash in the presence of any Microsoft product or Intel based PC. When in 1999 I finally bought my first iMac and thanks to Steve Jobs Apple’s ascendancy to the most valuable company in ze vorld was secured, nobody thought back to those painful years between 1986 and 1998 when Apple was almost completely irrelevant outside the graphic design studio.

So, do I get any Lurve from Apple for my unwavering commitment over 20 years of ownership (ok, their shares made me a fair bit of money)?

No. On the contrary. The bloody things seem to be getting more expensive every year.

But then, would I have any other portable computer? Looks I’m locked into their business model forever.

They are rather shiny, though.

 

Mmmh. Shiny.

 

Moving from the Mac to Ubuntu?

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It’s time that we had another geekish post, as there has been far too much footy and other stuff lately So today we will focus on the age old lament of people switching to Linux because they fear Apple’s hardware and software lock in. THis time it’s Salon.com’s Dan Gillmor to make the big jump and I completely understand where he’s coming from. I’ve done it numerous times: after I sold/broke a Mac I swore solemnly to embrace Open Source and would end up buying some laptop and install Ubuntu/Suse/Mandriva/Debian/Red Hat on it, just to pine for the functionality of ease of OS X on a MacBook and end up byuying one 6 months later anyway.

It’s perfectly ok to be suspicious of Apple’s control freakery, but in the end their stuff works. No missing drivers, no blue screen of death, no Kernel upgrades that go awry, no hardware problems. I have Ubuntu Karmic installed on my Desktop where it works just beautifully, but just because I continue working under the hood to MAKE it work.

Not so my MacBook (s). Since my first Powerbook 150 back in 1993 they have performed dutifully from day one, survived numerous drops and my current one dutifully updates my Ipad (which I now carry around with me instead).

So if Simon wants to go down the exciting road of Linux on the Laptop, I wish him luck. Being old and lazy now, I prefer to use what works.

P.S. Looks like Ubuntu isn’t working on his new Levono.