Consumer Cravings Arise—but this time, they’re politically motivated.

I want this. I’ve heard nothing but great comments about the latest Mac products and especially OS X.

I was the resident “Mac Expert” at my first ISP job back in ‘95 even though I’d never really used one for anything other than writing some papers in college. I was posted in front of a Performa and told, “from now on, you’ll be our Mac guy” and just went to work. I learned a ton about Macs, but at the time they were pretty weak as far as interoperable networkingand especially TCP/IP went. Client software was a nightmare to get (you had to download ping, telnet, ftp, and everything else—and usually, you had to pay for it) and the Open Transport, while a good idea, provided very little in the way of feedback to aid the user while troubleshooting non-functional connections.

I quickly built a Linux desktop to do my more serious networking and system-oriented work because it was just about impossible from the Mac.

Now, Mac has a shell! You can download open source software for it! Apps are on the way! It looks terrific and I have actually sat down at OS X and typed df -k. It rocks.

It seems to me that OS X is really the ideal OS for somebody like me who has to do productivity types of tasks such as spreadsheets, word processing, limited development of web sites and applications, lots of technical operations such as remote management of systems and has a passion for digital photography and multimedia (8500 MP3’s and counting).

Mac’s return and the new products are the synthesis of elegant, superior Apple hardware with a thoroughly (finally) modern OS, combined with a culture of creativity and a political stance against the monopolistic, bloated bastards of Wintel world. I need to add that I think Windows2000 is a FANTASTIC OS—probably the best desktop OS, but you buy into a whole lot more with MS than you expect. With the onset of XP, Microsoft is doing even more to grip the world in its tendrils.

Most people don’t realize this, but MS is moving to the “services” model which will make, for example, your address book a service hosted my Microsoft and becomes part of the Hailstorm group of products. The idea is great, but the fact that MS can tie proprietary access to their services into the OS, make it difficult for third-party services to gain exposure within the OS, or even lock out access to their services via alternate clients, is scary. Your calendar, your e-mail, your file storage—all of these and many, many more elements of your computing experience will be provided as services by various organizations and companies.

All computing will probably shift to this model. But it can be done “right” with Open Standards and new technologies. I trust that Apple may team with an alliance such as the new meta-directory project called the Liberty Alliance, the goal of which is “to create an open, federated, single sign-on identity solution for the digital economy via any device connected to the Internet.” Microsoft already has a big jump with its Passport service, so we’ll see what happens on that front.

The on-line world is shifting—so I want to be converting.

Conversion is the big problem. It will cost me thousands—not only in new Mac hardware, but in all of the investment I have in Windows productivity applications like Office 2000, Dreamweaver and Fireworks.

If anyone knows where I can get a used Mac pre-loaded with OS X and a ton of apps for CHEAP, let me know!