Longtime readers will recall that the last mac laptop I purchased so infuriated me that I dropped all personal use of Apple products – it was a g3 ibook at the dawn of the osx age and I still stand by my opinion that it was basically an unusable machine. Subsequent revisions to the OS addressed most of the issues, but that took over a year. In the interim I have been using pc laptops. At their best they were decent, mostly I didn’t care very much for them though, and when I left Maine I sold my laptop to one of my students, planning to buy a new one in NY….

(well, actually that’s not entirely true – I was promised one when I was hired at my new job, but it hasn’t made itself available to me yet, and meanwhile I need the machine at home. That left me unwilling to press the issue at work (after all, my immediate needs for it are at home, not the office) so last week, I bought a new g4 ibook on my own nickle.)

Anyway, so far it’s been great. I don’t like that Apple solders 256 MB to the board of the machine and then leaves only 1 slot free for ram expansion (at a bare minimum if they’re going to solder ram to the board, it should be 512MB), beyond that I have nothing but praise for the machine. While it’s no speed demon, it is more than adequate for my needs – it’s basically a writing tool and something to browse the web and chat online with when I’m sacked out in my living room. It excels at these tasks.

As soon as it’s paid off, I’ll be buying an isight for it and (get ready to chortle in triumph kevin, jesse, and the rest of you who have been hounding me about this for literally 6-7 years) re-activating my long dormant AIM account, or making a new one if the old one has been purged, so that I can use ichat’s built in av chat functions, which is really cool stuff. There’s also a very cool app, Delicious, which I’ll blog about soon that uses an isight in an exceedingly clever manner.