I'd never seen this one before, and yes, I believe it pretty much nails it. (Culled it from Lileks this morning, whose fine post today should stand as a model for every serious blogger.)

The only thing that kinda bothers me about it is the halo over the iPod in the beginning, (did I miss a joke, here?) Do I consider myself superior for using Mac? No. These are computers like all others are computers. You may not have heard, but Mac has a blue screen of death, too, and yes, sometimes I can't find my files, etc. But I do appreciate the packaging. Don't mind, even, paying more for it, really. Whenever I see a box of Windows product, I think my brain is going to brim with petty responsibilities. Seriously, I don't care what third party endorsements you got, just work, dammit. My new computer arrived at the door last week and it almost made me laugh: a black box with a picture of a computer on one side of it, and reading "MacPro" on the other. I'm surprised the wording on the box didn't just read "COMPUTER". Ha! (Last Friday's post has a pic.)

In this, the week of my new computer, I am now happy to report that the sleek machine beside my desk is whirring along with nary a hiccup. (Actually, there's not much whirr at all. It is nearly silent, save for when the DVD drive kicks in, at which point it whirrs like the engine room on a Russian submarine.) I ordered it with the minimum amount of RAM possible, and was dismayed to find that it couldn't just hack it -so I went out to pick up a couple more gigs at Fry's, local discount electronics store extraordinaire. Apple charges a premium on all their add-ons, so if you want an additional hard drive or RAM chip, you can spend an extra few hundred bucks on the exact same product by having Apple put it in for you. Amazing. So do I think Apple is the greatest company in the world? No. Pizza Port is.

It's a crazy world when you'll pay extra for better marketing, but you'll pay less to do it yourself. (Oh, I think I may have revealed too much about myself, there.) Such is capitalism.

So the computer works terrifically. I even got an OH WOW moment out of my wife, as she asked for an address and I said, "Watch how quickly it comes up when I click on it-" and BAM there it was! This is noteworthy only in the context of how she asked me for an address last week, and we bided the time chatting while it loaded up. Anyway, it was worth the price of admission right there. My vacation time just doubled.

It happened again, too, as I was getting ready to go to bed. After asking the 'puter to do a few all-night tasks, I decided to set the screensaver, and it was an OH WOW moment like no other as a picture of the Little Ditchman came on the screen and we slowly zoomed out to show it in a mosaic of ten, a hundred, a thousand other pictures of the Little Ditchman whose colors blend in such a way as to become another photo of the Little Ditchman. (You've seen this sort of thing before.) And then it happens again! Fantastic. And that's just the screensaver! It's stuff like that that makes Mac cool and geeks drool.

Incidentally, we had some friends over the other day and reclined after dinner -marveling over the AppleTV screensaver. Again.

So it's great! Now, I've got to clean up the office and get to work. Where do I start? And how do I start on a beautiful summer day like this? Weather: 72 and Sun. All week. In November. Best month of the year in California.