switching teams

No, not that team!

This evening, I placed an order through the Apple Education Store for a brand-new 20-inch 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with iWork ’08 preinstalled. I have been eying this thing for months as a replacement for my Compaq Presario R3000 laptop. The old girl is still chugging along, but her memory is failing and she can’t keep up with all the apps I need to run at the same time.

I decided to go for a desktop since that’s really what I need at home now. The Presario worked okay as both my desktop and portable laptop, but it’s heavy, and the keyboard isn’t comfortable for long-term use. A Macbook would be lighter, but the keyboard thing would still be an issue. And, since I have a laptop at work, I won’t need to have something to cover the portability thing. In any case, I mainly needed it for work-related things such as taking notes at conferences and staying connected to work while on the road.

I waffled for a while between getting a Windows machine or getting a Mac, but in the end I decided that I’d get more bang for my buck with a Mac. I’m sure there will be a few applications I’ll miss from my PC, but from what I understand, there are more and more equivalent or better applications to do the same thing on a Mac, plus there’s the whole Parallels thing if I want to bother with it.

I’m not going to get rid of the ol’ Presario anytime soon, either. I’m pretty sure it will take me a while to transfer all my important files, and I may just turn her into my dedicated music server, depending on whether or not my external hard drive containing all my tunes will work with the iMac or not.

oqo

Have you heard of the OQO computer?

There’s already been several years of buzz about OQO, but I somehow missed it until yesterday, when our systems administrator told me about it and directed me to the website. For those like me who have been out of the loop, this is a full-fledged PC that can fit in your pocket. It’s more than the Pocket PCs currently on the market (full Windows XP and Office programs), and it comes with a built-in keyboard. It has WiFi and Bluetooth built in, 1GHz processor, 20GB hard drive, and 256MB DDR RAM. You can easily hook it up to a full-size keyboard and monitor to simulate a desktop experience. I’m impressed! For those who just can’t wait to get their hands on one of these, they’ll be available in the web store this fall. No price is given at this point, but I’m guessing they’ll be several thousand dollars. Considering that it would replace your desktop, laptop, and PDA, the price might actually be reasonable.

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