Tuesday, August 21, 2007

New Toy

I haven't done a whole lot of riding lately due to being kind of busy (lazy) lately but I have gotten a few rides in. There isn't a whole lot new to talk about with the bike except that I got a new set of pedals off of eBay that should shave a few grams off of the total weight. Also, the broken cage finally snapped completely off on one of my rides so the bike now has one orange cage and one chrome one which looks kind of lame. In other news, my computer finally broke last night so I went and picked up this new one.


I have never been a big fan of Macs but this new iMac is really sweet. Now that I don't have anything important to do on my computer, like school assignments or work, I don't need to worry about software compatibility. The Apple machines really excel with media management, which is what I will primarily using this computer for. Plus, Apple is known for having a solidly built product which is a welcome relief after the giant peice of cheap plastic crap that was my old Dell. Another attractive quality of the Mac is that Apple is very environmentally friendly, which is something I strongly support. This is prevalent in the new iMac as it is made of easily recyclable materials and, like most (or maybe all) Apple products, it meets Energy Star efficiency regulations. I think my biggest complaint with Apple over the years is that their fans seem to have a really snobby and elitist attitude. Fortunately, I am not like the common Mac user and am not really worried about that happening to me.

I had some reservations about getting a Mac because of some dislikes that I have had in the past using other peoples machines. When I went to the Apple store this past weekend I was glad to see that pretty much all of my concerns have been fixed. Apple has taken a big step into the early '90's by making a mouse that has the ability to right click, unlike the ones that they were producing a couple of years ago. They have also changed the default method of opening of Expose to be be controlled by the mouse buttons instead of moving the mouse to the corner. For the non-Apple users out there, Expose is a feature that will show all of your open windows in a tiled arrangement so you can choose which window you want to view. On other peoples machines that I have used, Expose was opened by moving the mouse to the top left side of the screen, which is where the close and minimize buttons are located making it easy to accidentally activate this feature. There are plenty of articles about the other features of the new iMac so I will not go into those details. Instead, here are a few more pictures of this sleek machine.





2 comments:

Spur said...

Nice looking computer, Andrew. I like your GG wallpaper. Next time your in town, we can go tour Apple headquarters if you want. It's just down the street in Cupertino.

Andrew said...

Thanks Spur. You may recognize that GG pic from our trip to the headlands a few months ago. Apple configures their computers to have Cupertino as the default location for a lot of things so the first time I went to check the weather forecast I was reminded that you are enjoying 75 degree highs everyday. *Sigh* I guess 100 isn't that much hotter.