My New iMac

I have no problem admitting that I have been absorbed into the Cult of Mac. It started with the iPod. I, as did many of my coworkers, received a 30GB iPod as a sort of bonus for a significant product release a couple of years ago. As a result, I started to use iTunes and paid more attention in general to Apple's products. A few months later I found myself picking up a used 12" PowerBook G4. I was impressed with how small, yet functional the device was. No Windows laptop I had ever used came close. I was pretty much hooked. Even though I had a Windows PC that was superior, in terms of speed, to the PowerBook, I used the Mac almost exclusively. I've long been a fan of BSD UNIX and fundamentally that is what OS X is... but with a much nicer GUI than anything else out there. As I've previously documented, I then took the plunge and purchased an iPhone earlier this summer. And now, my conversion is complete; I bought a new 24" iMac. I decided to go all out and purchase the model with a 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. I then upgraded the memory to 4GB after receiving it (memory upgrades are generally a rip-off from the manufacturer, whether it be Apple or Dell).

The screen is BEAUTIFUL and the machine is very, very fast. Unfortunately, I haven't found CD ripping and transcoding software for OS X that I like as much as EAC and foobar2000, so I use VMware Fusion to run Windows XP in a VM when I need to rip a CD. Even running in a VM (and only allowing the VM to use a single core), the process of transcoding from FLAC to AAC is roughly 10 - 15% faster than it was when running XP natively on my Windows machine that had an Athlon 64 3200 and 1 GB of memory. I no longer have any computers natively running Windows at my house and I doubt I ever will again.