(Long post below.)
I've just done something I would have thought unthinkable up until now. Something worth smacking myself in the face with a real estate sign for.
I have purchased a Windows PC.
I've been a die-hard Mac user since, well, the '80s, and still am. I've always owned Macs, and Caffeine Sunday records using Macs. The main Nash Family computer is a relatively new 17" iMac, and it is best computer we've ever had.
Ryan owns a similar iMac as well as a brand new Macbook.
I also love laptops - I've always loved the ability to work on whatever I wanted, from wherever I wanted. Which brings me to one of the biggest "old flames" that, despite having broken my heart repeatedly, I still love. She was the one complete dud piece of crap Apple has made in recent memory. She was the iBook G3.
See, several years ago, I decided I really wanted a new Apple laptop. In fact I gave up buying CDs, DVDs, or anything of the like for one year (which for anyone who knows me, was a huge deal) in order to help save up the $2,200 I needed to buy a gorgeous white iBook. Bringing it home was like reliving Christmas as a kid. This was in late 2002, I think.
It was a brilliant piece of work. Compact, fast, beautiful, really easy to use, durable, and able to do pretty much anything I wanted with it (except for recording audio, no matter how I tried, using my laptop as a DAW always sucked royally). But underneath it all, she was unstable, a self-mutilating beauty that would nearly drive me crazy. One day mere months after our storybook romance began, in the middle of simply using it to type some email as per normal, the screen went crazy with a digital version of psychedelia. The only way to make it stop was a hard reset, and when the computer started up again, the screen was black, no matter what I did.
This, as thousands of other iBook G3 owners would later discover, was a logic board failure. Without warning, the integrated ATI video card would just die, and the only way to replace it was to replace the entire logic board. Which if you didn't have warranty, would cost you about $1,000. According to several online sources including Macintouch, these iBooks had a failure rate of 40 per cent. 40%!!! (Here's someone else's experience with the same thing. Note the slight sense of frustration in his tone! He wasn't alone...)
But remember, this is before anyone really knew this, and waaay before Apple acknowledged it as a known concern and issued an "extended repair program" to cover the logic board replacements.
I took the laptop back to the Edmonton store where I bought it for the diagnosis, and the fix. (Keep in mind, to have it looked at and fixed, you were without a laptop for a couple of weeks and you didn't get a loaner to tide you over until the iBook was returned).
Three months later, the same thing happened again. Oh, and the installed RAM failed, and the keyboard failed, and the screen failed, and the CD/DVD combo drive died twice. Each time, I'd have to drive it into the store, have them figure out what's wrong, fix it, and then drive back in to pick it up. It was supremely frustrating, and utterly ridiculous at the same time. My friends all started calling it my iLemon. But back to the logic boards, less than six months after the second board failed, the third one bit the dust too.
The store decided to just replace my unit with a brand new iBook G3 (and remember, this is before Apple issued a repair program for these iBooks, and trying to explain my growing disgust for the computer with Apple customer service reps was an exercise in stoking homicidal tendencies I never knew I had).
Great, I thought. Finally. Maybe another unit would let me use the laptop I loved without taking it into the hospital every couple of months for a complete brain transplant...
Nope.
About six months later, the screen went crazy, and so did I. The logic board died, and I was beside myself. It got fixed, and yes, sure enough, it only took a few more months and it died again. It was fixed, this time on the extended repair program, in time for me to take it to Japan in 2005 (the PowerPoint my Japan group presented to 16 different Rotary clubs ran on my iBook, and it performed flawlessly the whole time there). Caffeine Sunday used it in gigs to run Reason live. I also bought Serato Scratch Live to DJ with, and I was going to use that old beat up laptop to run that digital DJ system. Silly, naive. Some would say foolish, given her history with me.
And yes, it died again. Another logic board, and a hard drive death to boot.
I put my coveted, damaged, messed up iBook in its sleeve, I put it in a corner, and I left it. I bought a Mac Mini as a stop-gap (remember, without a laptop I had no computer) and that very cool (and reliable!) computer is in my studio today. But I've been without a laptop for nearly two years now.
Last month, the time had come to revisit my laptop life...
(to be continued with Part II -- "Why a laptop, why a PC?")
cn
