MAC LOVE

I was twelve when my family moved to California and ditched my most prized possession: my computer. On the other side of the pond, when it came time to buy a new computer we were going to get a G4 mac. This had me distraught, and I fought tooth and nail to be allowed to have a windows PC as well. I won, but side by side it was immediately obvious that my stubbornness was misguided. I hadn’t used a Mac before, and what they say about the learning curve is true: at first you feel a bit lost, wishing for a start menu, but those feelings quickly disappear to be replaced by contentment bordering on ecstasy. It’s like floating after a lifetime of walking. After a few years of struggling along with my HP monster I never looked back at Windows machines.

The latest object of my technolust is the iPhone. I can’t leave the house without someone on the bus pulling theirs out to taunt me. Sadly, they are way out of my price range. I was out with a friend recently when he felt something underfoot, reached down and picked up an iPhone from the floor. I held out my hand in awe, and he placed it in my grasp. This was the fulfillment of my wildest fantasies. Having let me feel its smooth, cold weight in my hand though, he had an attack of the conscience, snatched it from my clutching fingers and handed it in at the bar. I went up to the bar a few minutes later and asked the bartender whether my iPhone had been handed in. He told me it hadn’t. He is now one iPhone up, the previous owner probably got a new one on their insurance, and I am still regrettably iPhoneless.

Thanks to a great deal on iPods when students buy a new Apple laptop, I am now the proud owner of one 16GB iPod Touch, very nearly the answer to my dreams. Gapless playback is everything I wanted and more, reinvigorating those DJ compilations that have been subtly annoying me for years. More important than that, though, is the touch screen GUI, which is so smooth that it feels like swimming around in a pool of my favourite music. It makes such a difference to scroll through my music collection in the blissfully rendered, fluidly animated cover flow mode.

It’s also opened up a world of new listening possibilities with BBC iPlayer and Last.fm applications usable when I’m connected to WiFi. The biggest drawback is that flash websites are not supported (except YouTube), but that’s a minor quibble alongside the beautiful and intuitive way the rest of the internet looks and feels on it. And if the one thing I resent about Macs is that developers are unwilling to make games for them, the App Store takes a big step in assuaging that gripe. I can’t wait to download Worms for my favourite new toy.

MAX GORDON
WRITER