January 11, 2006

the agony & the ecstasy

So we finally have an Intel-based laptop from Apple… what we’ve wished and waited for — but how cruel the debut. Jonah was telling me last night how bummed Jason was about the news, having just bought a new PowerBook three weeks ago. I’m pretty torn myself… still using my old 1GHz PowerBook that’s at least 2 years old, and now that I’m on the road all the time I really need a new one that can run Final Cut, Adobe Creative Suite, Flash Pro, maybe a little World of Warcraft, and encode an iPod movie in less than 10 hours. Despite everyone telling me just to buy a new Powerbook already, that Intels weren’t coming out til June/Jan 2007/etc, I waited til MacWorld just in case… and sure enough, they’re coming. Now I am really in a bind. I need a new PB now, and the MacBooks won’t be in hand, you gotta figure, til at least March. Sure, I could pick up a refurbished PowerBook at a discount, or look for people unloading them on eBay, but for just a few hundred dollars more you could put down the money for a shiny new MacBook, that’s benchmarked at up to four times the speed. What to do?

I guess there are worse problems to have.

Jason, some consolation (or how I might also justify getting a Powerbook like yours):

  1. the new MacBooks have a lower resolution than your top-of-the-line PowerBook - still the pinnacle of 15” PowerPC laptop engineering.
  2. yours has FireWire 800 support, so some video guy will want to buy it.
  3. the brighter screen would probably keep you up at night anyway.
  4. security! Who knows what bugs the Intel Macs will have in the first six months. We can’t afford to have kottke.org offline.

update: according to my sister, who just sent a comment on this post — I am a NERD.