t was a somber day for the Dvorak family recently when my son switched to the Mac, likely never to return to the PC. I saw this coming. The family flag is flying at half mast.
“He didn’t want to tell you because he was afraid you’d get mad and talk him out of it,” said my wife on a dreary Washington state morning. “What? I wouldn’t talk him out of it!” I retorted as I gritted my teeth.
I was lying—I probably would have tried. That said, his was a smart move, since he was following the advice of pundits, technology writers, and everyone who ever gave advice about what to buy and why: “Buy solutions, not hardware.” In his case, the solution was a stunning piece of software called DEVONthink, which he needs for a book he’s writing.
This thing sucks up PDF files like crazy, first organizing and then sorting them into manageable database blocks. I’ll leave it to reviewers to fully explain its features, but let me just say that it’s about as close to a killer Apple app as anything I’ve seen since VisiCalc in the late ’70s.
You’d think there would be a PC version, but no.
Anyway, he ended up with a new MacBook Pro, one of the few laptops being sold that actually impresses me. It’s got that hard aluminum unibody that makes the thing feel like a rock. There is none of the flexing and bending of a typical laptop.
Apple had added multi-touch, developed for the iPhone, to the track pad. Two fingers on the pad and you can do all sorts of fancy moves that are slick and interesting. The display is gorgeous and crisp.
All these whiz-bang features make me realize that I have fallen behind. First of all, I have not assumed the position and moved to a laptop as my primary computer. I prefer a desktop machine loaded with memory and power. I still write reclined with a keyboard on my lap and my feet up on the desk. These days, everyone is hunched over a laptop.
When I do use a laptop, I prefer the lightest machine I can get hold of. I continue to use an old Toshiba R200 weighing in at 2.2 pounds. Toshiba pretty much owned the market for extremely lightweight machines but seems to have lost interest in the business altogether. Their ultra light machines are too expensive to sell well in the current market, and the rest of the line is moribund. The company has also totally missed the boat on the netbook, although the Libretto from years earlier could probably have been the genesis of the netbook. But the company cannot bring itself to mention this to anyone, so it is out of the game.
Then we have Dell, HP, and Lenovo. Somehow Dell found its way up the ladder along with HP and Lenovo. My son originally was considering one of the highly recommended Lenovo machines. That’s what I was going to talk him out of. I think the Lenovo machines are ugly and weird. On Cranky Geeks, I was moaning about all the holes they have on the bottom, when I was told that you can spill a glass of milk on the keyboard and the liquid gets flushed out through those holes. I was aghast. While I’ve heard of people carelessly spilling a drink on the keyboard, I have never done it in 20 years of laptop usage—why would anyone design for such a happenstance? Make the thing bullet-proof why don’t you? This is just dumb.
I was also thinking about the gorgeous $675 Gateway laptop. My other son nixed that idea, saying the thing flexed too much and it would undoubtedly result in failure. Nothing was as good as the MacBook Pro, and it had the DEVONtechnologies software.
He pulled the trigger and got it for $1,050 with a free iPod thrown in. If I was going to buy a machine this minute, it would probably be what I’d get, too.
His only complaint, and thank goodness he had at least one, was his experience at the Apple Store, which is evolving into a place where you have to endure structured sales. It’s like a car dealership in the ’70s, with layers of various salespeople, each trying to screw you. A recent episode of The Simpsons poked fun at the ridiculous pretension and snooty attitude of the store and its sales staff.
I actually think that the Apple Stores are barriers to sales, and people only buy Macs because the machines have clearly moved ahead in genuine usefulness. Overall, it’s a pathetic indictment of the entire PC scene.