A trip to the Apple Store

While the girls were napping this afternoon I paid a visit to the Apple Store in King of Prussia, PA. I'll be taking a business trip to Sunnyvale, CA in a couple of weeks and with the prospect of a couple 5-6 hour flights, I felt that it's time I got myself an iPod.

Before I got the iPod I spent some time drooling over the new Intel powered iMacs and Mac Minis. Aside from the drop dead gorgeous LCD displays that Apple uses, the thing that struck me is how fast these boxes are. I opened up MS Word and Excel on an iMac and a Mini. Keep in mind that the Office 2004 apps are still PPC binaries, not Universal Binaries, so they have to run using Rosetta PPC emulation. They still smoke my G4 iBook. Yep, the next desktop PC in the Markowitz household is going to be an iMac. (Not for awhile, though.)

Since iPods are not just music players but can also be used as external hard drives I decided to splurge and go for the top of the line 60 GB model. Thankfully, my employer participates in a program with Apple that gets me a 6% discount. Unfortunately my iBook can't boot from it, since the iPod USB-only, and the only external drives that G4 iBooks can boot from are Firewire devices. The new Intel-based Macs can boot from USB drives, however.

Now I need to go and rip the rest of my CDs. I'll still have most of the drive empty for awhile even after I load all of my music onto it.