So…48 hours back on a Macin­tosh laptop and I am in ser­i­ously danger of get­ting drunk on the kool-aid again. What is it that pulls one back?Shawn Day Hav­ing never really left was part of it. I simply was being interdenominational.

I have my iMac in the liv­ing room and an HP Media Centre in the den. I con­duct most of my daily work on my laptop though. I am a happy user of an IBM Think­Pad X32. I did not come to the X32 blindly. I star­ted using Think­Pads on a daily basis back in 1999. Before that I was that bane of the Win­dows world: the Mac bigot. I had a 128K Mac in 1984 and traveled the Apple path, work­ing for the largest reseller in Canada, win­ning Power­Books in con­tests and acquir­ing a small, but respect­able com­puter museum of around 50 machines — mostly Apple. I have since divested myself (invol­un­ar­ily of most of them — retain­ing, some of the more exotic — my 20th Anniversary, an Apple II, an Apple III, a Mac clone, a ream of Power­Books, a few New­tons, a Lisa of dis­puted own­er­ship etc.) But it was 1999 that changed things for me. It was just before the Mac became the vis­ible major­ity. Clearly Macs were and still are the minor­ity, but they are quite fash­ion­able to wear in pub­lic and if you are in edu­ca­tion, they have an inflated popularity.

This is not to pass judge­ment on tech­nical abil­it­ies, qual­ity or value, but at some point, we hearty pir­ates remained so in name, but not in sub­stance. You aren’t tak­ing a chance by buy­ing a Mac any­more. There’s no extra steps that we have to do to fit in. In many cases, the other side makes the effort. Its a real shift, but one that’s even more so appar­ent when you are on the other side.Pbname

In 1999, cor­por­ately we had to bridge the Win­dows and Mac world. So our desktops stayed Mac, we put a Windows-based machine on each desk and our salespeople got Win­dows laptops. Then so did I. Now, a Think­Pad is about the best you can do if you ‘have’ to embrace the Win­dows plat­form. The sleek black slab has the aes­thetic appeal — and it screams that you are on the dark side — if you are there, you might as well sing it proudly — its the Mac approach to being on Windows.

I star­ted with a T series Think­pad. Sleek, slim and power­ful. A great machine. After two years I faced the choice of going back to Mac, but after weigh­ing the options, it made sense to get another Think­Pad. I had a fully kit­ted out G4 at the time and I had a need to run some Win­dows stuff. Emu­la­tion sucked. We lived that lie for a long time — much like the mar­ket­ing speak that con­vinced us that PPC archi­tec­ture could grow infin­itely whereas Intel was going to hit the ceil­ing in 1995 and die a hor­rible death. Yeah…ironic, eh?

So, unfor­tu­nately, I went Win­dows for mobile and OSX on the desktop. I would argue that Apple makes finer laptops than desktops and I had my usage reversed. But, without the mater­ial resources to have one of each, it was one of the other. Over time, I became more mobile and I toyed with smal­ler laptops. I wanted to stay Think­pad and I picked up a cheap X30 to play with. Sweet. I weighed off the advant­ages of the more power­ful T40 and the con­veni­ence of the X30. In the end I man­aged to find an X32 that was the per­fect com­prom­ise. Nearly the power of the T40 in the foot­print of the X30. I was stuck with three laptops (a rough lux­ury — but one I couldn’t afford). Man­aged to find good homes for the two and moved to an X32-centric universe.

The little black slab has been a trooper (and still is). Earlier this year I pushed it a little too far and have done some irre­par­able heat dam­age to it run­ning SQL routines that should have been done on any of the other boxes, but there it chugged for 12–14 hrs at a time hand­ling some mon­ster data­bases. But it has sur­vived and des­pite two cata­strophic fail­ures, it sol­diers on…and then came last Thursday.

A very good friend agreed to trade his ori­ginal 12 inch Power­book in exchange for some work. I am stuck on size and Apple doesn’t have an ultra-notebook these days. There are rumours every­day and we hold our breathe, but I knew that the little PB was really the machine that interests me. No, its not intel-based so no mul­tiple OS. No, there’s no iSight built in and right now I am run­ning on 384Mb after adding 128. It has a small drive and it’s the ori­ginal 867Mhz model. But it is one of the sleekest pieces of kit tech that I have touched in a long time.

Why is it so cool? Well, its got to do with the whole exper­i­ence. Its starts with the super­fi­cial. It looks bet­ter than any­thing else out there. No question…nice little roun­ded corners, appro­pri­ately lit and ori­ented apple on the hood. It slips in an out of a knap­sack as it should. No square corners to make you have to jiggle. It just goes sloooop. Per­fect. The tactil­ity if supreme. It’s cool and sleek, it’s hot and solid. The little light in the latch that throbs when it is sleep­ing is the subtle little touches that make a Mac spe­cial.
The key­board is amaz­ingly good. Now, I am com­ing from the gold stand­ard in laptop key­boards and the one in the Power­book is pretty close to being as good.

As I gush along through this, I have to com­ment that find­ing those neat little OSX only apps that I really couldn’t bene­fit from over the past few years is a spe­cial little secret treat. Stock trade like iLife and IWork are increas­ingly visu­ally refined, but lets not fool ourselves, they are crack cocaine. Apple uses them to sell hard­ware and the most recent ver­sions push the lim­its of this older hard­ware. But the subtle touches remind you that they are just shy of black magic. The fact that the little mail swoosh was lost on me run­ning on a desktop Mac. With head­phones plugged in I sent some mail and it aud­ibly passed right in front of me as it winged it way to des­tin­a­tion. That that sound is ste­reo is just too cool.

There are some neg­at­ives. I am still not happy with the track­pad, but I am not as dis­pleased as I thought I would be. I do wish it was one of the later mod­els that allowed for two fin­ger scrolling. I do miss that from the Think­pad. I still believe that the touch­point con­trol­ler is the most nat­ural input device that I have ever used. Sim­il­arly, the con­trol key (and that I have to use it to be able to pre­tend like I have two but­tons on the track­pad) is a pain. CTRL/Opt/Cmd is too many mod­i­fier keys for me, espe­cially when com­ing over from Win­dows. I am used to using CTRL-C there and use CMD-C on the Mac, even though the other key is there. Three is too many. Yeah, its got USB 1.1 rather than 2.0 and image trans­fers suck, but to be hon­est, this machine makes you want to work around these shortcomings.

Over the past few years, I have bemoaned the switch to OSX from pre­vi­ous MacOS’s. I called it the primary school pen­cil approach to inter­face. Everything too big…visually impress­ive, but waste­ful of pre­cious screen space and indic­at­ive of impre­cise inter­ac­tion. Sit­ting using OSX again (and I am reflect­ing on NextStep here) there’ more detail than I super­fi­cially enjoy on the desktop. On this cute little laptop, I real­ize some sub­tlety that I missed by appre­ci­at­ing from afar.

I am typ­ing away on the PB right now, using OSX-only Ecto to com­pose blog posts and even though I am run­ning 10 main apps under 10.4 in this min­is­cule amount of memory, its still work­ing. There’s some­thing impress­ive in that.

And this brings it all together. The exper­i­ence is all-encompassing. The feel, the sight, the inter­ac­tion, the tactil­ity, the sounds bring one into com­mune with an inan­im­ate object in a very strangely sen­sual way. This Power­book 12 is sexy. Its has its flaws, but right now these are what makes the rela­tion­ship personal.

Have I returned to the fold? Seen the dark side for what it is? Well, time will tell. Right now, the hon­ey­moon con­tin­ues.