Well, it’s finally happened. After years of quiet envy and Apple lust, I’ve finally joined the ranks of the tech elite and aquired a 17-inch Powerbook at the Barton Creek Apple Store today. I’m typing the current missive on this beast right now, and I must say, I feel a bit disoriented and overwhelmed. It was weird to just turn a new computer on, and have everything just work straight out of the box. Even after a good year of tweaking, my Thinkpad still gets highly confused when I try to make it connect to my wireless access point. I think the final straw was when it locked up again today after changing Wireless APs from PrimoNet to InvolutionNet. Those in my inner sanctum are aware of the similar problems that I’ve been having with my AMD Athlon XP-based recording workstation. All this just kept wearing me down, and making me hate the status quo of my computing situation (Microsoft) more and more.

Strangely enough, I’ve been drinking the Microsoft KoolAid since early 1991 using MSDOS 2.0 (iirc), and have never owned any Apple computer, ever. I think I was even reasonably happy with everything up until a couple of years ago. However, Apple has steadily kept innovating while Micrsoft has sat around milking their monoply and fixing massive holes in Windows NT for the past six years. I remember installing Windows 2000 in late 1999, and being completely overwhelmed by the stability and robustness of the system. Six years later I was still using Windows 2000! There was no point in upgrading to XP for the Luna interface that looked like it was designed for a five-year-old with ADD, a highly unstable “Movie Maker” tool that crashes when you try to edit anything longer than 3 minutes, and a new shiny Draconian end-user license that looked like the basis for some kind of Orwellian performance art piece.

All that being said, I’m still a Linux and BSD fanboy in the server space. I still run Linux boxes in several states that comprise the back-end of involution.com. I’m partial to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on my servers because IBM and Red Hat beat the kernels and daemons to death in rigorous testing environments. My RHEL4-based servers are the most reliable and predictable machines that I’ve ever run (sans AIX). As a desktop system, I’m underwhelmed by Gnome and KDE (and Enlightenment, Fluxbox, CDE, etc) on X11. OS X is so much more usable than any *nix system that I’ve ever tried (Solaris, AIX, Linux (Red Hat 4.0 to 9.0, Fedora Core 1, 2, 3, and 4, RHEL3 and 4, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu (Hoary and Breezy), Mandrake, QNX (Neutrino), FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). OS X just seems to work and not get in my way like a Linux X11-based desktop does.

I’m infinitely loving the Powerbook experience so far, and I so wish I go back in time and get in on the ground floor of the OS X revolution, but I’ve finally arrived to the party about four years late…