Knights who say 'INT's Journal: I've been lowendmacced

I've been lowendmacced. I feel good.

Nah, the fine folks at lowendmac.com have nothing to do with it.

I bought a Mac about three months ago, and now it's a low end Mac.

Between the decision to adopt Intel processors and drop PPC, and the bloat discontinuity between Panther and Tiger (yes, I did Tiger for a while), I've decided to downgrade to Panther and come out as a low-end Mac user.

I don' t really regret it. Buying a Mac -- I was one of the hordes to buy the Mac mini, and I bought the $600 model -- was the best bang-for-the-buck decision I could make, since draconian import taxes to Brazil would make a similar xing-ling white-box assembled-at-the-corner computer more expensive, and buying a black-boxed Dell would cost almost as much as buying an Apple locally.

A friend smuggled the mini in his hand package. Whoa, the Mac mini is the cheapest computer I could have bought. And it's quite an upgrade from the K6-with-Gentoo-and-ion3 I was using.

Anyway. Still in the Gentoo mentality of emerge -uD world everyday, I upgraded to Tiger as soon as it came out. It wasn' t smooth, but 10.4.1 was around the corner. 10.4.1 fixed some stuff, but the Beach Ball of Death and the general sluggishness was killing me.

Spotlight was useless from the get-go, and I disabled it the only known way, banning my entire hard drive from its scan list. Dashboard was actually pretty cool, but on the 256megs Mac, widgets wouldn' t appear the first time I invoked it, and they'd be eating memory like it was, uh, memory.

The whole thing sucked.

So now I'm a low-end mac user, like the ones who bought the iFruit and are still proud of their machines. It' s a good box, it's tiny -- and that helped me with the smuggling, and helped me once when I wanted to show a PowerPoint presentation with one of those built-in-the-conference-room overhead projectors with minimal hassle -- it was inexpensive and it does the work I need. TeXShop is the best LaTeX platform out there, and the PIM tools (iCal, Address Book, etc.) keep me in line. And, well, it does run Adobe Photoshop and Excel/PowerPoint. And it has Python!

Somehow, I feel a sense of pride in being a low end mac user. Liberated from the gentoo kiddie neurosis, I feel more like Jerry Seinfeld with his classic Mac lying there. It does his job and gets him from point A to B, right?

Maybe it' s because I started having a sex life that the trappings of the gentoo way of life don' t attract me anymore. My computer is not the reason I have to live anymore. I don't need to be able to brag about it, except in the sense I brag about not caring anymore.

I've been lowendmacced. I feel good.