MacRand's Profile

Yep. Back then MS DOS was so primitive, it was almost silly. Late 1990 is also about when the MacLC came out. I happily got one with a big 40 MB HDD, a small color monitor and a discounted Apple Laser Printer, all for under $3,000 and it worked wonderfully. That was a great price when compared to the $14,000 UNISYS wanted for an upgrade to my B-26 intelligent terminal word processor with an Intel 286 chip to a much faster 386 CPU that still had no GUI like Apple had. Finally, WYSIWYG where Adobe fonts displayed on the screen just like they would look on the page. The desktop publishing program I needed was Aldus PageMaker (not an Adobe product until 1995) so I could create forms and design documents with ease. I was in Mac heaven... still am. I've been Mac ever since, and have never owned a PC.

"Leopard slow..." - NO. Speed is relative to what you are trying to do on your Mac; high-end video editing needs speed, most of the rest of us do not. So the amount of speed bump produced by OS software will be the 'tell'. While I love my Intel MacBook Pro speed and dual platform capability, I still use my PowerMac tower with dual 1-GHz chips and speedy HDDs because it is all the Tower speed I need ...for a while. However, if Snow Leopard runs only as an Intel native OS X thereby stripping off Rosetta support for PowerPC chips and streamlining OS X by both shedding all the old junk and employing the latest and greatest code, the $$$ for a software OS speed bump may well be economically feasible and practicable. Compare Snow Leopard stats (when published) to swapping out FireWire 7200 rpm drives for faster 15,000 rpm drives and similar hardware upgrades to accomplish speedier processing of data. Only time will tell. Slow is OS 6 through OS 9. Slow is a 1990 MacLC running at 16 MHz (Motorola 68030 chip) with 1 MB of RAM. Slow is Dial-Up internet access and an old FAX modem.

$99 tops for good quality since it will run on only ONE (Intel) of my 4 Macs. The XP/Vista analogy is thought provoking; I like it.

I agree completely. Cash Flow is a critical financial consideration. USA truckers have been paying $199/year for WiFi limited to specific truck stops (like Flying-J, Petro, TA, Pilot, Love's...) or so they can get on the internet with their laptops. Other travelers have also been paying about $200/year for internet access on the road too. Monthly "dumb" cellphone rates range $60-$100. With 24/7 eMail and Internet access at 3G and WiFi speeds for only about $80/month in actual cash flow, an iPhone effectively combines cellphone and computer capability. So, replacing my "dumb" but compact (will miss small size) RAZR with super smart & fast $200 iPhone 2 is a no brainer economically or technologically. And the Apple COOL design factor is like... WOW! GPS and 3G is what I've been waiting for in the iPhone, and a reduced price tag is oh, so sweet!