A few words from a professional procrastinator

Mac mini and me

Last Monday while coming from a brunch meeting, I passed by a store which had mac minis in stock. I went inside and looked at their prices. Traditionally, prices in the mall tend to be more expensive than that of other retailers. But today was different. It was right there in front of me. A 1.42 Ghz G4 Processor, 80 GB HD, 512 RAM, 32 MB VRAM, Superdrive all for the low sticker price of 40,990 Philippine Pesos. For a mac here, that is cheap. The only thing that stopped me from buying it outright was that Macworld is coming on Monday with the very important Keynot of Steve Jobs.

As I stared at the box, I was running through my mind the pros and cons of getting such a machine. For one, it is significantly faster and has a much larger storage capacity than my current powerbook. But the thing with powerbooks is that once you own one, you never let go. You only get another powerbook. I’ve been trying for quite some time now to procure myself another powerbook but the prices never seen to match with my money in the bank. As the minutes tick by, the mac mini still remained on it’s glass shelf waiting to be adopted by a loving mac user. Or even better, a switcher.

One curious thing about Macworld is that all the new stuff for consumers come out on Macworld. It is expected that new software and hardware will be unveiled at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. One rumor site mentioned a radically different powerbook. A laptop that runs on flash memory. I’m not talking about RAM. I’m talking about hard drive space. But there’s no hard drive. Much like what powers the iPod Nano and the Video iPod. There is no commercially available hard drive as thin as the Video iPod so it’s safe to assume that the Video iPod runs all of it’s 60 GB off a flash drive. That would be very interesting to have a portable without any moving parts apart from the optical drive. I just hope the reliability of data storage is there. The one thing I don’t like about flash drives is that one can just lose all your data in a blink of an eye. We’ll wait a few months before diving into that.

So back to the mac mini. I forgot to say that it had built in wireless capability. Airport Extreme or 802.11g was included as well as Bluetooth 2.0. I mean, what’s not to like. Sadly, it’s the video card. I mean, most games for the mac nowadays run off 64 MB VRAM. Double on what’s currently available on the mac mini.

The iMac G5 on the other hand, for all it’s grace and power is unfortunately unreachable for me as I’m writing this entry. At more than double the price, it does have the power and the features that a power user such as myself would love.

I turn my back at the glass shelf and walk out of the store. Knowing that Macworld less than a week away. I leave with the feeling that something very nice is on it’s way.