For 2 weeks, I was a switcher.

I had wanted to give OSX a try for a while now. It seemed, on the surface, to be fantastic. The geeky goodness of Unix with the simple interface of the mac. What's not to love, right? So it was off to the apple store.

For some reason, the computers in the Apple retail store just didn't do it for me. The high end was too high, and the low end was too low. I came // that close to buying a dual 2.0 G5, but in the end decided on a used G4.

So for 2 weeks, all was OK. Not good, not great, but OK. Growing pains and all that. I originally wanted to talk about the dock, and my hatred of the dock, and the utilities I found to make the dock more bearable. But then the other shoe dropped.

Apple went to Intel.

If I had bought that G5... wow. It's hard to really put into words what I think Apple's done here... It's like every car manufacturer got together and said "Hey, in 2 years all of our new cars are going to run on solid gas. All of the gas stations will be changing over, but we're sure they'll still pump the old liquid stuff too. Meanwhile, keep buying the old cars too".

Right.

I don't forsee any good McIntelIntosh machines coming out for a while. Intel motherboards, and I gotta assume that Apple is going whole hog for Intel here, have horrible integrated video, not to mention sound. And Apple loves integrated video. Other than the powermac, every Apple has integrated video... but decent video. You won't find a FX5200 integrated on an Intel mobo.

Not to mention that Intels are notoriously hot. And heat takes cooling. Which takes a fan. Which makes noise. Which is very unApple-like.

And we haven't even touched on the real reason Apple is doing this: DRM. And that's beyond the scope of this.

So I'm scurrying back to Linux. And I think an Athlon64 would look nice next to my desk...