It’s kinda nice and all, but seri­ously, so expen­sive. I’m sure the parts are all really high qual­ity, but that I can source pretty much all upgrade options offered for half the price or less — for exam­ple, adding a mea­gre two 512MB sticks costs an obscene $AU499, whilst even the most ridicu­lous gamer-marketed RAM (you know the stuff, it’s sup­pos­edly ‘tuned’ in pairs, etc.) can be had for $135 for two 512MB sticks (OCZ brand) — is rather telling about their hor­rific markup.

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great qual­ity and mag­i­cally never crashes and all the rest of that mar­ket­ing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wan­der back over the other side of the room here and install Win­dows on my equally-powerful sys­tem for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your mon­i­tors. I can pick up an equiv­a­lent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offer­ing… and if I’m con­tent with a mea­gre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seri­ously, it’s com­pletely unjus­ti­fi­able and no-one in their right mind should be pre­pared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new hard­drive and var­i­ous soft­ware licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly every­thing I can do here I can do in Win­dows (haha — does any­one else notice the beau­ti­ful inver­sion of that argu­ment? I actu­ally think I’ve been run­ning Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except any­thing requir­ing a ter­mi­nal. That’s almost def­i­nitely my great­est frus­tra­tion, but no mat­ter. I need soft­ware that doesn’t run in Linux and is too inten­sive to work well in vir­tu­al­ized con­di­tions. Best option for me would be to get a whole sep­a­rate com­puter, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Win­dows I’d prob­a­bly get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Ker­nel patches are the only thing tak­ing this down, basically.

Moral of the story… some­thing like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.