I finally bought a Mac today.  As you may know if you’ve been following me, I’ve been thinking about it lately.  I’ve been considering getting a new computer for a few reasons.  I almost always work in the office, as opposed to going out somewhere, so the mobility of my laptop wasn’t a huge deal.  I also tend to burn through laptops pretty quickly, as much wear and tear as I put on them, and desktops are much more robust.

In fact, I’ve got a desktop that’s probably eight years old or so and still runs.  However, it’s either degraded or bloated (or maybe just outdated) to the point that it takes forever to do simple tasks like opening a browser or even getting the menu to pop up when you left-click.  I use that computer to run some processes, and it’s gotten to be a pain.

My current laptop works perfectly fine too, so if I do need to take it to a meeting I can do so.  I just won’t burn it out as quick.

So why a Mac?  As Travis pointed out to me on Facebook over the weekend I could get a PC with better stats for about half the price of what I can get for a Mac.  However, I like how much control Mac has on what gets put on its system and the reported stability of the system.  On top of that it’s cheaper to upgrade operating systems and I think you can generally do it without formatting your hard drive.  I also played with the demos at Best Buy, and despite the fact that I’d call myself an above-average PC user and am pretty firmly entrenched  with my knowledge of what’s where and how to do just about everything on a Windows machine, I like how smooth the Mac OS is.

At any rate, I saw that the Macs at Best Buy are almost $100 off right now; cheaper than they are on Apple.com, so Amanda and I discussed it and I went to buy one. She told me as I was heading out the door to make sure not to upgrade from a 21″ iMac just because I’m a bit of a tech snob, and I told her I wouldn’t, but by the time I left she told me to go ahead and get the 27″ one. That was, I might add, through no asking or cajoling on my part. She asked if the larger monitor had any benefit for me and I said that with all the graphic work I do, it could certainly help. I’ve also been kicking around the idea of replacing our mammoth old-school 40″ tv, and since we watch a lot of online videos these days a screen that size could replace the tv. I don’t remember if I actually said that or not though.

Plus it just looks so much nicer. I mean, if you compare the two side by side…

While we were discussing it we figured out what the monthly payments would be (Best Buy’s offering 18 months no interest), which comes out to significantly less than we were paying on the windows that we just paid off.  The only thing Amanda said was to not get the other keyboard and trackpad yet, because we’d be getting a good bit of money in the form of gift cards from the Reward Zone card for making a large purpose, and I could put it towards them.  I thought that was a great idea.

So I went to Best Buy and signed up for their new credit card, which surprisingly only took a couple minutes. Then I waited a good twenty minutes to get some help.  The guy I talked to yesterday about the computer was bogged down with an older fella who, from what I could gather, couldn’t remember his Yahoo email password and therefore couldn’t log in to check it on his iPad.  Seriously, that guy was there the entire time I was and then some.

I walked away for a minute to see if they had any boxes so I could just grab it myself and go check out, and when I came back a minute later there was another employee, but she was helping some guy find an adapter to help hook multiple computers up to one monitor, or something like that.  I waited a while then walked around a bit to see if I could find somebody else, or to see if I just hadn’t looked in the right place to find boxes of iMacs, and when I got back, not only were those people still busy, but another guy was there, only now he was helping some other guy find some accessory or other.

I wish I’d looked at my watch when I was first ready to get the iMac, because I’d like to know if it really was 20 minutes or if it was longer.  I was getting pretty irate, and if I had another option to get the computer under the same conditions, I’d have gone away to do it.  And the thing is, the guy who helped me yesterday, he saw me, and he had to see the paperwork I was holding for a Best Buy credit card.  At the very least he could have said, “Hey, I’ll be with you as soon as I’m done helping this guy.”  I always did that when I worked at Best Buy.  People just like to be acknowledged, you know?

The moral of the lesson, of course, is to never wander away for even a minute when you’re trying to get some help.  Anyway, the third guy was the first one available and he went and got the iMac from the warehouse and rang me up.  There was an issue ringing me up too, but I didn’t care about that because at least someone was giving me some attention.  (And that stuff never really bothers me anyway.)

When I got home Amanda said to Milly, “Milly, look at Daddy’s new toy.”  “It’s not a toy,” I corrected her.  “It’s a productivity tool.”  I did go through all the pre-installed wallpapers with Milly so she could pick one out for me.  She chose Mt. Fuji, which she called “the volcano”.

I had it set up pretty quick, though it did have trouble synching with the mouse at first.  Aside from that, it was set up and ready to go in no time. I spent the rest of the day trying to do some work while simultaneously learning this new operating system.  My fear was that I’m so used to how things work on a PC, with all kinds of little tricks and workarounds and whatnot, that I’d be lost.  I did have a little trouble finding the network information, but I did find it and took care of the problem I was having.  I feel like I’m learning it pretty fast.  I also got a program that will allow me to run Windows without having to reboot the computer.  It was actually able to copy my entire laptop, which is great because it’ll make moving files, particularly the years and years of pictures that I have, much easier.

Michael came over shortly after Callie and Brynn left.  I’d be lying if I said that part of the reason I wanted to go ahead and get the iMac set up had nothing to do with him coming over.  Anyway, he wanted to know how to change some things with Jenn’s website, so I spent some time giving him some rudimentary lessons on using Chrome’s code inspector to help diagnose a site’s CSS.

After he left Amanda and I listened to our small group homework.  Milly wanted to play Just Dance on the Wii at the same time, so we turned the TV down really low and tried to listen to Andy Stanley while watching Milly try to dance to Katy Perry’s California Girls.

Cyra watched Milly tonight while we were at small group, which was a talk about the Law.  Funny enough we had a spirited (but civil) political discussion prior to starting the study.

Zach Dotsey