After Long Absence

A long time ago, in an industry far, far away, I used to write Mac code.  About the time System 7 came out, the company I was working for’s interest in Mac faded, and I went off to do Windows. 

The Mac was a fine system, and had a consistently nicer interface than Windows, but I was fond of eating and so were my kids, and other Mac gigs were hard to find at the time.

My last Mac was a IIci—until this week.

Smugly nestled next to my P4 XP Pro box is now an eMac, running OS X Jaguar. 

Before you go “eww, an eMac!”, this thing is a bargain right now (under $700 from many sources, with 128K / 40 gig / CD)

Running a 700 mHz G4, with the addition of a little ram and an external firewire drive, this is pretty comparable performance-wise to a Power Mac G4 at a grand more.  Sure, I’d rather have an LCD screen than the 17” CRT (although it’s a damn nice 17” CRT)—for that matter, I’d rather have a 1 gHz TiBook, but it’s not much of a sacrifice for the difference in cost. 

Upgradability is a lesser concern; usually when I upgrade a machine (which is quite often in the PC world), I consider myself lucky if I can salvage the case and power supply; everything else changes too fast and it’s easier to just make wholesale changes.  I can live with confining my CD & DVD writing to the PCs for the time being, also.

I’m pleased to have finally found a reason to get one.  I now have two clients who are largely or entirely Mac internally, and I want to make sure that the sites I build for them render properly on the new crop of Mac browsers. 

I’ve also recently discovered that a substantial number of the users of my site building / e-marketing site is Mac based (due apparently to the amount of Mac users reading RSS feeds), and I’d certainly like to be selling them web development, e-marketing and web hosting services, as well.

Coming back to the Mac is a very interesting experience.  While there is a lot that is familiar, there’s a lot that’s changed in 12 years, too… I imagine I’ll have more to say as I learn my way long…

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