TECH: One Apple to rule them all

TECH: One Apple to rule them all

Ahhhh. Mac geeks the world over are slobbering at the latest MacWorld presentation in San Francisco today by Apple guru Steve Jobs. Lots and lots of interesting stuff announced, which I paid a closer eye to than normal.

We're definitely in the market to replace our creaky 1999-era home iMac sometime this year. I'm not one of those people who has to have the newest and shiniest toys, but our iMac is definitely falling behind the curve, especially when I compare it to the groovy flatpanel 2005 iMac I've got here at work. When we use our iPhoto program at home, the whole computer slowwwwws down to a crawl, and don't even get me started on importing music on that thing. It's amazing how fast the field changes. My iPod, smaller than my fist, can store 30 gigabytes on it, while our home iMac barely fits 6. This Mac at work has something around 150 GB of space!

Anyway, I was hoping to get a new laptop computer, but am a bit dismayed to see they will start at a cringe-inducing $1999 for the new MacBook Pro line. Anyone know if their lower-end laptops will also be updated with the new Intel chips? Whatever I do end up getting (probably this spring or summer), it'll be a Mac. I've been using the beasts since high school (pretty much every paper I've worked at uses Macs, it's the quirk of the journalism industry it seems) and adore them unconditionally. You may pay a little more, but I'd take one iMac over 10 Dells or other PCs any day.