for years i have wanted to switch over my home computing from pc to mac. i bought my first mac, an imac special edition, in 2000. i'm familiar with macs because pretty much all the friends i've had since moving to santa cruz were mac people and all my jobs have been mac based. i just wasn't used to macs in a more intimate way that comes with personal use at home. buying an imac was a cheaper way to achieve this. i thought if i like how it goes, i'll convert completely over to mac, but might have a pc laptop now and again so that i can be familiar with what's going on in the pc world and serve as tech support for my mother. of course, serving as tech support is not very appealing. over the years of having the imac, dealing with pc pains, and more recently using mac os x at work, i decided that i don't want to be a support person for pcs at all. not for my own and not for anyone else. i never upgraded to windows xp and i never will. i fucking hate it! everything since windows 95 seems to have been a disaster. i want to switch over to macs completely!

i have been getting very tired of desktops because there's no mobility. i have wanted to switch to laptops. there is the downside of laptops but i really can't afford a mighty g5 and i definitely can't afford even having a cheap mac laptop and desktop. if i'm going to get a laptop, i want it have some strength to it. i would only get an ibook if i had a big and beefy desktop. i decided to pool all my resources into getting a powerbook.

this works for me on another level as well. i want to move out of here and do some traveling, preferably extensive traveling in new zealand, which means i must get a laptop and sell my things anyway. i'm cutting into a bit of a lucky break as right now the campus bookstore is selling bare bones laptops at a slightly lower price than the education price. bare bones being that it is the very basic laptop without any upgrades possible. although i would like memory upgrades, i really really can't afford it at this time. buying the laptop now at the cheapest possible price and then buying memory in 1-2 years when i will have some money sounds like the most logical thing to do.

i had already started to think about what the mac must be able to do. i must be able to do everything on it that i already do on the pc. i do some things on the pc just because i already know how to do it so i haven't learned how to on a mac. this is mostly a software issue. i need to be able to have both audio inputs and outputs for recording purposes. i want to make my own music and digitize/clean up old records/tapes/etc. that i have. if it's a mac well then there must be final cut and quicktime pro. there is no getting around that. if i am going to have a laptop for traveling, then i want to document my travels and make mini-movies. i learned final cut pro 3 and now there's already 4.5 aka HD. HD even at the academic price costs so much more than previous versions that it's heartbreaking. i don't even need HD capabilities! i wish i could find someplace that had old versions in the warehouse that they are trying to get rid of but so far i have not had any luck.

the two programs i use all the time for getting my shit organized are filemaker pro and excel. i use them extensively on both platforms so there's no worries there. of course i will be using the laptop for organizing personal music, photos, and designing web sites and i am already very familiar with most of the programs i will be using for that and i do not want to get any of the upgrades for adobe/macromedia products as i think i am quite fine without them.

my only concern is email from my old life. i have so much fucking email on my pc. there's tons of files in general on the pc that i need to sort through, organize, and archive for the move to mac. i've read about some ways to eventually get email on os x but it sounds too much of a pain to me when there is already a program called outlook2mac that will do it for $10. i think i will get the program.

i am also concerned about watching multi-region dvds. it's not a necessity but i would like to screen capture dvds from other regions. i have read about a lot of different ways to watch other regions on a mac and i don't know if i'm willing to risk making modifications to my brand new baby. maybe when the baby is 1 year old. i just can't think about this right now.

also, i love the terminal. really. i love that mac os x is unix based. i love the terminal.

if i'm going to have os x and be traveling, i definitely also want to get an ipod. here's where my money gets sucked away. i am such a music lover and have such a collection that getting anything besides the 40g ipod is out of the question. ipods are known for their poor battery design which is going to cost me replacement fees about every 1.5 years. that's not too bad. i can live with that a little bit--just a little bit. if the model i get happens to perform worse than that, i'll be pissed. i've been looking around for scripts/freeware/shareware/etc that i might find useful once i'm all geared up and this is what i have found:

• sound studio - i have been using the demo for months and i love this program; i have to buy it once i get the powerbook
• ableton live - this seems like an excellent piece of music software for the price but i can't get everything i want
• iconographer - because making your own icons is cool
• audio hijack - i've been using the demo and it's great!
• snapz pro x - an image capturing tool because this is one of the extremely rare areas of built-in os x that isn't sufficient for my needs
• ipodrip - another cool and cheap program; i read somewhere that this sort of software is essential for ipod accidents where the entire library is wiped out
• irooster - an alarm clock--how else am i going to wake up?
• podstat - looks handy but unnecessary
• ipodit - let's you put non-music files such as stickies into the ipod which could come in handy when on the road but i read that using your ipod as a pda severely depletes battery life
• ispeakit - let's you convert text into audio and loads it into the ipod--i'm pretty sure this can all be done through built in mac os features but it's so much easier to have a little piece of software like this do it for you
• itunespublisher - publish your playlists. why? because everyone wants to know what i'm listening to ;)