4 posts tagged “g5”

I'm back, at last! Well, it's been a hectic couple of months and, without going in to all the details of when and how, I am now the proud father of a little girl who has, it has to be said, settled in amazingly well, but has taken my attention away from my blog here and other things that I would usually do i my spare time. In fact, it's simple to say that I have had no free time. I wouldn't change a thing, however - she's perfect and mother and baby are doing astoundingly well.

 So what's new in the world of tech and gaming that I have been tinkering with? Well, first up would be iPhone OS 3.0 - it's funny how a few minor tweaks can turn something cool but not so practical into an indispensable tool, but that's just what OS 3.0 has done. The ability to sync Mail and Calendar to my Google account without requiring extra steps or interconversion on my part, the ability to search the entire phone, the ability to Copy/Paste and, best of all, tethering (where you use your phone as a wireless modem for your laptop) have made my life so much easier - I can copy text from web pages into emails, I don't have to send all my work appointments to my Gmail account, then import to iCal on my laptop, then sync them by connecting my phone and, joy of joys, I can now surf the net on my laptop whilst on the train without requiring a pre-paid dongle for £100+ and pay an arm and a leg for data usage (or pay yet another monthly contract fee). Ok, if you are stupid, your network provider will figure it out and block your phone, but for checking emails and browsing eBay on the move, it totally transparent as its the same level of data trafic you'd get surfing on your iPhone.

 To be honest, the latest Apple Keynote didn't wow me so much - the iTunes news was cool (DRM free songs, etc), but the rest left me a bit cold. With the iPhone 3GS, which has video (big whoop) and is marginally quicker than the standard 3G iphone, I don't really feel the need to rush out and upgrade, unlike the jump from iPhone to iPhone 3G, and the cost of upgrade is potentially huge (O2 and AT&T are not letting consumers upgrade part-way through a contract, depsite the fact the handset will cost £300ish). I also think that, because there was no true "Killer" product (no new Mac Tablet, or iNewton, etc) that Apple probably missed Steve Jobs' presentation style more keenly. Steve is cool in a way that Bill Gates could only dream of and the slightly portly fellow who did this keynote (whos name escapes me temporarily) is obviously a committed board member, who follows the Church of Jobs - I believe he has assisted in a few keynotes before - just didn't have the same charisma. He spoke the same sort of words, but they sounded like a school teacher trying to be "down with the kids" - I truly believe that a lot of Apple's ability to weather the global financial crisis is going to hinge on Steve Jobs' health as without him, Apple struggles to maintain its ice-cool image and begins to look like a bunch of middle-aged men trying to hang on to the image they had in their College days. There is also the danger that, without Jobs, Apple could slip back into the Gil Amelio-era style of iterative design and focus-groups - Apple is only competitive when it stays ahead of the game in terms of design - anyone could build a Xeon-based PC for the cost of the MacPro, but it's the qualit of the design and build and the superlative OS X that gives Apple that edge - lose that hip feel, need to innovate and design culture and Apple would sink faster than SGI, who went from top dog in the Supercomputer and 3D workstation market to bankrupt in a very short space of time and their arena of competition was far smaller. Get well soon, Steve, for Apple's sake not just your own!

  Sticking with Apple, the other news is that I have had to scale back plans to buy a new MacBook Pro 17" and an iMac (babies cost a lot ) and have just purchased a replacement for my old G4 Powermac (which now lives with my Mother who is in love with her "new" Mac) and also for the Dual Xeon PC that has been the staple of my home office for about eight years. This machine (Dual 1.7GHz Xeons, 4GB RAMBUS memory, RAID SCSI 10k drives, DVDRW and NVidia AGP 6800 card) has been more than quick enough until recently, when I just started to feel that it was becoming a bit long in the tooth - as PCs go, it's been great - reliable and fast, but then again, you do get what oyu pay for and, with the huge cost of RAMBUS memory when new, this beast weighed in at £10,000, including a (then) huge 18.1" LCD screen, DVDRAM backup drive and SoundBlaster Audigy with LiveDrive (connection breakout box in a drive bay, basically). Oh, and the Wildcat 5110 workstation class graphics card cost £1500 but was obsolete within 18 Months...still, such is the way with PCs.If you're ever in the market for a PC-based workstation, I can really recommend Boxx - their customer service was amazing over the life of this machine, but I never really enjoyed owning this computer in the same way I have a soft spot for my Macs (and my SGIs). So, rather than put it on eBay and get a pittance for it, I'm turning it over to the network for use as a video and music server and I'm also sacrificing the beloved Blue Dalamatian iMac G3, which is going to live with my parents in their guest room so that visitors can surf the net and check emails, etc. I've already got a G3 Pismo laptop serving that purpose here...

  So, what did I buy? Well, after much hunting, I've just taken delivery of a Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 with 6GB of RAM and the 256MB X800T ATI graphics card. The silver hot rod also has 500GB of drive storage, which means I should need to upgrade for a while. I was after a Quad 2.5GHz machine, but my budget wouldn't quite stretch (although, in true sod's law fashion, minutes after I'd paid for mine, I had someone offer a Quad for not much more - ah well) and whilst I could have gotten a dual 2.7GHz, I picked this one as it had a good solid spec with a lot of RAM (one thing the Boxx did teach me is that 4GB or more of memory can really be worth a good 500MHz of CPU speed, as you'll lose more time writing to disk than you would waiting for a slower CPU to read out of RAM). I'm just awaiting the 22" widescreen TFT that was sent separately and I'll see if I can't get some photos or video of it all when I'm up and running.

 Given that I have a PS3, I'm not too fussed about not having a Gaming PC - I'd like to play Empire Total War, but, frankly, it's more important that the machine I use is stable and lets me do my work on it; I will work from home on it more than I will get to play on it - if I have leisure time it will most likely be spent with my family and games will be played in the lounge, socially, on the PS3.

 The other big reason I am happy with the G5 is that I'm not interested in running OSX 10.5 (Leopard), as it has no support for the old Classic applications and games that I have many of - I'm more likely to want to run the apps I spent money on than games I won't have time to play or be forced to pay out a fortune to update apps that still do the work I require just so they will work on OSX 10.5.

 I know that there is a good business case for dropping the legacy code now that Apple are aligned with Intel, but how many people bought a G5 at a cost of £4000+ that is still useful (and fast) as a work machine only to find it basically being phased out after two years or so - Leopard doesn't support anything less than an 800MHz G4 (according to Apple, anyway, although it might run if you hack the install), but Snow Leopard is due to drop all support for PowerPC systems, which means that machines that are still not end-of-life in studios and small businesses are effectively being made obsolete.

 Not since System 7 dropped support for the original Macintosh machines (68000 CPU series), forcing users to buy LCs or Macintosh Classics, has there been such a cull - by the time OSX rolled around, anything pre-PowerPC chip was basically landfill and most of the Beige G3 machies could run it, so it was a gradual process. A small business (and I know because I am, and have been, one) does not pay out £6k for a top-spec Mac and large screen only to replace it three or four years later - that machine will stay in service until it is literally of no practical use or it breaks down. It might not be the go-to machine after two eyars, but it will be used by junior staff, or as a back up, or for temps...then it might be used as a server or as a render-node, or even just to surf the net and write letters, but it will still be in use. Hell, last year I even saw a Blue and White G3 tower being put to use by an art department who needed all hands to help get a project out the door - sure, it wasn't quick and it ran an older version of Photoshop, but it still actually did the work and that's what businesses care about. The gamer culture of must-have-latest-and-greatest which is vaunted by the PC fanboys in their breating of Apple products is actually not sensible for business users, as those uber-quick gaming rigs tend to be unstable and unproven - agencies and the like need machines that are quick enough but, more importantly, are rock-solid and dependable - hence the proliferation of Apple machines.

 I guess that there is an incentive for Apple to force people to buy the new Intel machines, but there are a lot of XServe or G5 PowerMacs in academic use (Virginia Tech built a supercomputer for $5.2Million using them) and the custom apps on them either may not recompie on Intel x86 or it might be cost-prohibitive, so what about those users? I know for a fact that the media editing department of a multinational oil company still has a whole bunch of G5 towers under their desks, with only those which die beyond repair being replaced with Mac Pros - the investment is huge and corporate finance dictates that as long as the machines are useful, they won't be replaced and, unfortunately for those trying to sell you a new Intel Mac, Apple machines stay useful for far longer - Snow Leopard feels to me like an artificial attempt to force corporate buyers to replace machines in order for OS support contracts to stay in place, etc. In short, it feels a little cynical - what happened to Apple only phasing out sstem support when it was no longer a viable OS for the platform?

 Given that my old G4 which, although fitted with a Radeon card, larger hard drives and a lot more memory, was only a 400MHz CPU and still felt snappy enough for most work (ok, it chopped a bit when rendering out video and also could take a while to resize HUGE images) - especially Flash and web design work, where the files tend to be smaller, and the Dual 1.7GHz Xeon box was always quick because of the RAM and the drives, I can honestly say that my G5 will be the core of my studio for some time to come - especially as I want to be able to run my Classic apps. I dare say that in a year or so when I have some decent spare cash, I would like to get a Mac Pro 8 Core with all the bells and whistles, but actually....I think I'd much rather buy 5 G5 Quads for the same money and get more work done on a distributed workflow.

  I know it sounds stupid, but I have always preferred the RISC CPUs of MIPS on Silicon Graphics and Motorola/IBM's PowerPC on Macintosh to anything Intel have come up with. The Intel machines tended to run at faster cycles, but their instruction set and bad architecture tended to make them hot and not actually that quick in real-world terms (same goes for AMD). Basically, the G5 I have was proven to be 40% faster in real-world terms than a Dual 3.06GHz Xeon PC (which given I am only now running down a dual Xeon 1.7GHz machine gives an idea of how much more competent the Xeon workstation-class boxes are compared to a normal PC). I know for a fact that my Core Duo machine running at 1.6GHz (a £2000 Sony Vaio) was nowhere near as quick and, whilst I can get a quad core 3.0GHz Xeon for £LOTS, I really cannot justify the expense on a new machine when £500 on eBay has just upgraded my studio to be at least 50% more efficient for when I am working and made an infinite upgrade for my leisure time as I've got more power in less space and have freed up room for miniatures that need painting, the coffee maker that has been languishing in a cupboard and things are way more organised now I haven't got the extra machines taking up space.

 Life is never simple and now the money which was going to buy my new Mac G5, a new mic for podcasting (the Blue Snowball...mmm, yum!), a new set of paints and brushes for my miniatures, some clothes, some PS3 games and Bluray movies and a few days out and meals for myself and my lovely wife (and baby) has now been ear-marked for two single beds for the guest bedroom (not that we have that many guests), more baby clothes (our house looks like a branch of Mothercare collided with a Baby Gap already), a sewing machine (why?) and shopping spree around Babies'R'Us. Still, at least I have my PowerMac, the paints and the prospect of a few nice dinners....can't be all bad!

As we all know, Microsoft used the tagline "what do you want to do today?" (or "where do you want to go today?" in web-related ads) in a lot of PR, whilst Apple tended to stick with "Think Different" or, in earlier advertisements, "Tomorrow's PC, today" or variations on that theme. So, putting aside all the hyperbole, it seems that both are focusing on pushing the user experience, as opposed to the hardware itself. Windows' advertising aims itself at the audience by asking what you want and, by implication, suggesting that Windows has the ability to get you there. Apple tedns to position itself as a bit left-field, more creative in its thinking and thus better able to understand your needs. In fact, in reality, its products do tend to meed the users' expectations far better, so maybe it's a case of the ads just reporting on the reality. However, all this talk of advertising is getting me away from the crux of what I wanted to talk about, which is that, whilst I love older Macs, just how useful are they? Should I stop lusting after a quad G5 with full RAM and top-spec graphics and settle for a brand new top-of the line iMac instead, given the cost of G5s at the moment? Is there any value in buying last-gen technology when the current stuff is available from such (comparitively) low costs?

 Well, maybe not in the case of a G5, as it's no longer the top-dog workhorse and prices are artificially high from all those private owners who are trying to recoup the cost of purchase and are, thus, maybe being a little unrealistic in their acceptance of depreciation. For example, I bought a Xeon-powered Windows workstation in 2002 that cost in excess of £10000 (for a business I was running). It had 4GB of RAMBUS memory, a 128mb Wildcat graphics card, Audigy soundcard with I/O box, etc and is still usefully quick today. However, it's worth about £4.50 if I stick it on eBay and I think the G5 towers are suffering the same thing - they're more than just useful (in fact, only those who are doing feature film editing or working on high resolution images for use on billboards are likely to call them slow, but adding the full compliment of RAM would help with that). However, if I can buy an old quad G5 with monitor and it costs £1000-£1500 by the time the bidding stops, why wouldn't I just save up a bit more and get a new quad-core, dual CPU  MacPro? Or buy an iMac 24" with dual-core 2.8GHz and 512mb Nvidia graphics? I'm not being a nay-sayer, as I still love the old G5, but the fact is that people are being unrealistic in the market value at the moment, so I'd steer clear for a year until they drop through the floor. They'll still be able to edit your video, or tinker with your photos, but you won't pay through the nose for it.

 So why do I like the G5 so much? Well, aside from the design, which is a thing of Bauhaus-ian beauty inside and out, the fact is that I like the ability to fire up Classic mode and use all my old applications without the need to run an emulator. Not only that, but as someone whose home computing is mainly web-surfing, blogging and the occasional bit of image and video work, a G5 is more than adequate. Even my desire to get back to doing some Flash and Director coding is not going to tax it. Also, I'm always nervous about my main workstation being an all-in-one, as if the screen dies, I can't work, whereas if my old PowerMac screen died, I could change the monitor and carry on. That, and I'd really like the 30" display on my desk for artwork and layout work. Then again, the 24" iMac would be fine for that, too. Basically, whilst I am what would be considered a power user, the G5 would do all I need and be fast enough. Hell, my old G4 was fast enough. This is really the point - do you want the latest, greatest, oh-my-god-it's-so-fast machine to boast to your friends, or do you want to actually get stuff done. If it's the latter, then most Macs still running are useful (for a given value of useful). You can word process, do some DTP or web design, look at your photos, listen to tunes and edit/watch a movie. Who can honestly say they use a home computer for much else? Especially if you own a PS3 for gaming? Not me, that's for sure - I want something reliable (so I don't come in from work and then get stressed during my leisure time by a computer that won't work), well designed and that is quick enough.

 So what is "quick enough"?

 Last post, I talked about my love of Silicon Graphics machines, but the truth is that the central processors in them are slow. The machines are usable because of the huge array of custom hardware taking work away from the CPU, but in the Megahertz wars, they are trounced by cheap Intel chips. What they are, though, is stable. my old Iris Indigo was only ever rebooted when software installations required it. My Powermac G4 was also stable - working quite happily for weeks at a time until Software Update asked me to reboot. This means that renders can be left overnight if needs be, safe in the knowledge that they'll be done in the morning. If I left my windows machine to do that, it'd crash and reboot or run slower and slower until I restarted because Windows leaves junk in the memory and bloats its registry. So, in real world terms, the Windows machine was screamingly quick, but because it would require at least one restart a day, the truth is you only got the same amount of work done. Now, if the MacPro has all of the clock speed and none of the instability of a high end Windows machine, then it will be a thing of wonder, but in the real world, I think I'd get a good two or three years out of a quad G5 mac, because I don't really care if it takes an extra half hour to render out my hour-long film - I'll be billing for time if it's work and drinking tea and chatting to my wife if it's something I am doing as a hobby. In fact, the ability to let it chug away whilst I stare out of the window is a plus point in my books - it forces me to slow down and relax a little, as opposed to tearing along at 90mph all day, then getting in and doing the same in my leisure time. "Quick enough" means that a machine doesn't take two hours to respond to a key-press, but that it might take a little while to think about some hugely intensive task. It means you might not be able to do fifty things at once all at a million miles per hour, but that you would surely be able to do the tasks you were trying to do. Given that criteria, the G5 is perfect for me and, depending on the cost, I hope to pick up a quad G5 with maximum RAM and top end graphics ASAP.

 So, there you go - buy a G5 and avoid a heart attack. Surely that's a tagline that someone can use?

 A while ago I posted about the little G3 iMac and the PowerBook G3 I bought and how I thought they were great, which I am sure you remember and, given that I am typing this on the PowerBook, I think it's safe to say I haven't changed my mind just yet. So, when I was recently left to my own devices for a week, I thought I'd investigate this passion for so-called "obsolete" computer stuff. Or, more precisely, Macintosh stuff.

 There is a very good reason I stayed away from the PC side of things - they are not in any way inspiring. I can recall my first 396SX machine, but I don't wish to relive that experience. No way am I going back to voluntarily creating DOS batch files just to get a game to work, or having to manually edit Config.sys or Autoexec.bat files in order to get Windows to work, no matter how cool I thought "Catacomb: The Abyss" or "The Rocketeer" were. Besides, I can happily run them on my Vaio as it's still fundamentally x86 architecture.

 So, what's so appealing about old Mac stuff? Well, from a purely personal perspective, it goes back to the time I was going to get a computer for studying and doing my GCSE in Computer Studies on. Pocket money, birthday and christmas money and a generous father meant I had about £1500 saved up and I tried out a Macintosh Classic and an LC with 13" colour monitor. Compared to the 12MHz 286-based RM Nimbus harddisc-less machines at school (and they were good for the time, so how old do I feel?), both the Macs felt light years ahead in what they could do, but I couldn't afford the LC, the screen, software and a printer, and my dad wasn't keen on me spending hours in front of a 9" black and white screen. In the end, I was cajoled into buying the 386 and, whilst it did the job, I always felt a bit let down.

 Having been a teenage computer geek, I obviously read Personal Computer World regularly (it used to be interesting and covered Mac and Unix as well as DOS - windows was only at 3.0/3.1 at that point) and I harboured a desire to work on machines such as NeXT, Sun and, the Holy Grail - a Silicon Graphics workstation. Unix, with a friendly GUI-led operating system that had multimedia, 3d and digital audio support in 1992? That was the stuff of dreams. In fact, a review of the Iris Indigo stated that whilst the Indigo cost nearly £15,000, as opposed to an average of £1,000 for a 386/486 PC, it was definitely worth the money as it was far more productive than trying to do the work on 10 or more PCs.

 

 Later in life, whilst working as a software developer, I worked on SGI machines and they were truly as good as I'd hoped they would be. I bought myself an SGI Indigo on eBay for £150 (MIPS R4400 processor upgrade at 150MHz, with 192Mb of RAM and the Elan graphics, with 21" inch monitor) some time ago and I loved it.

 Given that it was made in 1993, my dad (who is now 66 and who has zero experience of video editing) was able to find his way around and tinker with some video clips within ten minutes. I would personally say that the only systems worth using are a Mac running OSX (with Classic supported), a NeXT machine or an SGI machine running IRIX. Anything else is compromised.

 Eventually, I bought myself a swanky new Powermac G4 (I was a early adopter of the G4) running OS9, then later OS X. It was everything I hoped it would be - usable, stable, reliable and a joy to work on. To put it in perspective, I later ran my own business and the Mac G4 was the preferred choice for video editing despite the fact it was sat next to a hugely expensive dual Xeon workstation with 4GB of memory. It just worked better and gave less hassle. Not only that, but I could probably sell the G4 setup for £200 today, despite it's age, whereas the windows machine is essentially worthless. Look on eBay for a used Powermac G5 (a machine that is some 4 or more years old now) and compare that to the cost of a Dell running a four year old Pentium. The price difference is down to the fact that Macs are usable for far longer (their obsolescence is far longer in coming). Windows bloats and bloats and you spend so much time fighting bad OS coding and built-to-a-price hardware, whereas the expensive (comparitively) Apple machines are still good as a workhorse years down the line. If you're more concerned about getting something done than about having the latest new toy, then buy a Mac. You won't ever regret it.

 So, what does this have to do with my original point? Well, aside from an urge to pick up a Mac Classic (or, ideally, a Colour Classic II) for the sake of nostalgia, my love of my old Powerbook G3 means that I'm not likely to be playing Quake 4 anytime soon (ok, I have a PS3 and a PSP, but I was talking about computers!), so I looked into the world of abandonware games. My word, there's a ton of cool things you can play on your old Mac and, because in those days we thought the Megadrive (Sega Genesis to our US friends) was graphically amazing, it means gameplay had to be more engrossing and plots had to mean something. With that in mind, I've explored the universe of Cosmic Osmo (this is the first game any child of mine will play!), along with Broken Sword, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max.

 

 If you noticed a pattern, then you're right - they are all graphical point and click adventures, a genre which is sadly underwhelming nowadays, but in the days when these were made, they were the nearest you'd get to playing a film and enjoying it.

 I've posted a few clips to give you an idea of what you are missing - if in doubt, you don't need to buy an old Mac (although I would), you can run them under either ScummVM, or you could download a Mac emulator from the trusty old interweb.

 

Personal favourites of mine are:

 

Sam and Max (I love the cartoons, too, as I get the humour)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis - a great sequel to The Last Crusade and very funny in parts.

 

 

 

 

 

Day Of the Tentacle (again, it's funny as hell and looks great)

 

 

 

 

 

The final choice is Broken Sword - great scripting, great graphics, the sound is fantastic and you really get sucked in. I believe I've played Broken sword on every platform it's been released on. The second one is good, too, although the later sequel on the XBox was a bit poor.

  So, have a look, enjoy and realise that whilst new games are lovely, sometimes you can't beat something a decade old for sheer enjoyment. And if anyone has an old Mac Classic/Classic II or Colour Classic they want to donate to aloving home, please let me know!

 

  Apple recently launched the new aluminium iMacs and very nice they are too – all brushed metal and glossy black, it seems strange that the same material combinations were used so effectively on my old Bang and Olufsen stereo, but then again, that was one of a few pieces of technology to be recognised as a design masterpiece and displayed as “art”, so maybe there is something in it. Or maybe I, like all the other thirtysomethings associate such aesthetics with quality through some memory of seeing such a stereo that belonged to a friends’ dad and coveting it. Who knows? The end result is that, as with the release of the first OS X, Apple have once again created a product that (in the words of Steve Jobs) “looks so good you want to lick it”.

 

  In days gone by, the review would have taken a bit of a downturn, if I wasn’t a total Apple fanatic, where I’d have to say that it was a lovely design, but it was expensive compared to the performance I could have got from a similarly-priced Windows PC. If I was a rabid believer in the Cult of iSteve, I’d probably have trotted out some line about performance not being all about Megahertz and being more about usability (and, admittedly, I’d have had a point), but ultimately I’d have had a really tough job of convincing you that the machine was worth switching away from Windows and the world of the dirt cheap PC in preference for a machine that looked nice but seemed over-priced for the performance it seemed to give on paper. However, those days are over – with the death of the G5 (something I actually feel a bit upset over – I like true RISC architecture and wish IBM/Motorola could have got it up to speed), we’ve now got a Dual-Core Intel processor with some nifty Apple architecture around it, so we’re talking about a machine that uses the same CPU as a PC, but which uses it better. Not only that, but if you absolutely have to have Windows, because of a Windows-only application (Microsoft Project springs to mind – we really could use a port of that, Mr Gates!), then you can simply install Windows on a partition or run any one of a number of programs that allow you to run Windows as an application on your OS X installation.

 iMacs in previous iterations were always a bit underwhelming – great if you just wanted to surf the Web, type letters or send emails, but a bit lacking in grunt if you wanted to play games, or work with video or large PhotoShop files. If you were anything approaching a creative professional, you had to lash out and buy a PowerMac  and a separate monitor costing thousands of pounds. The new iMacs, however, ship with high-end ATI Radeon graphics (128mb or 256mb, depending on your preference) and the minimum of a 2.0GHz Dual-Core processor means that you can revel in PhotoShop on your lovely glossy 20- or 24-inch screen. Not only that, but because the hardware is all DirectX 10 compliant, you can play the latest Windows games if you boot to XP or Vista (whichever you choose to install). No longer do you have to wait three years to get a game that was released on PC and now costs £10 when the Mac version is £40 – it could be the ideal compromise: Work on a Mac, play your games on a PC, all in the same machine.

  A quick note about the screen as there is a lot of mixed reaction about it on the internet and in various reviews. Yes, it’s glossy, so it can make it harder to match colours across media when working, but the Sony Vaio I am writing this on has a glossy screen, too, and I would rather have the higher image quality when viewing video and have a few viewing-angle issues than go back to the dull screens I used before - the same can be said for the iMac screen. Also, if you are that worried about how things might look when you work on digital work that has to match print work, then either use the Pantone number or a hex code to define the colour used in the print work and simply ensure you work to that. It’s not difficult and the rewards offered by the glossy screen far outweigh the negatives. Photos look vibrant, DVDs look fantastic and even a task as menial as writing a letter in Word or Pages becomes a joy to behold. Trust me, as long as you don’t aim a lamp at it, you’ll be fine – whether the screen is matte of glossy, it’ll still wash out to grey if you sit in strong sunlight or by a window, after all.

 There was an advert for electric shavers in the 1980s where the CEO would say “I liked it so much I bought the company”, well, I am going to follow his example and put my money where my mouth is – I will order myself a 24” 2.8GHz iMac with 2GB of RAM and 750 GB hard drive as soon as possible. After a few years away from the fold, I have returned to Macs and the joys of OS X and given a choice between a second-hand G5 Powermac and 20-inch Cinema Display or the new iMac, I would pick the new iMac any day of the week.

 A wise man once said: “In a world without wall, or fences, to constrain our imagination, who needs Windows and Gates?” – come with me and bask in the glow of Apple!