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My Apple Macintosh PageCube, iBook, Mac OS X (10.1.5)
I've got a G4 Cube and a tangerine iBook. My sister Ruth has an iBook too. It is a Key Lime 466 MHz iBook SE with a 20 GB Hard Drive and a DVD ROM drive (i.e. it was the top of the range model from May 2001). It has 320 MB RAM and runs under Mac OS X. She got an absolutely excellent deal from Cancom in the UK, as it was a Clearance Item from Apple. I thought she might get a cheap refurb if she was lucky when I stumbled across the clearance one! I think it was about £749 + VAT. I must say that the frosty white and Key Lime colours make for a very attractive laptop.
An iPod would be nice too... A Little History
Flash forward several years and I was involved with the working group looking into electronic artwork at work and I had to start using a Apple Macintosh again (a blueberry G3 tower). It was a bit tough getting back into the routine as I only used my Mac now and again at work. In the meantime I now owned a Packard Bell PC at home and so I was PC literate. As I already had a desktop PC I felt that I need a laptop so I could take it with me wherever I went, and as I was using a Mac more and more at work I felt that getting some sort of portable Mac was the way to go, or maybe an iMac if that was unfeasible (Powerbooks while powerful and stylish are rather expensive). Then I saw an advert for the iBook. Wow. I was sold. Needless to say I now think I am heavily Mac literate and I am now much more efficient at using Macs and PCs and integrating workflows between the two platforms. iBook homepage at AppleI have a tangerine Apple iBook that I bought in December 1999. I guess it's getting on a bit in computing terms but it still does the job. It's got a 300-Mhz G3 processor and I've has 288 MB of RAM on board. I upgraded with a RAM chip from crucial.com/uk. I'm was using MacOS 8.6 that came with the iBook... but I now use Mac's latest OS, which is the enigmatic Mac OS X. I jumped on to it the day it was released (2001 March 24?). G4 PowerMac Cube homepage at AppleMy next Mac purchase was a Cube. My iBook is great for travelling about and keeping up with my stuff while on the move but my next computer had to be another step forward in functionality (like the iBook was from my PC). I wanted a much larger hard drive, a bigger monitor (my PC has 15", my iBook has a 12" flat screen), more RAM, a faster processor, a DVD, Firewire ports for video and so on. My pal Anthony has a G4 an it is highly impressive. I thought that perhaps a dual-processor was the way to go. While a Powerbook would be nice I already have portability and I'm prepared to give up more portability in return for a seriously powerful (and cheaper) desktop computer. And I'm now Mac-enough not to get a PC. Apple then dropped the price of the Cube dramatically at the start of this year to stimulate sales, so I picked up the basic 450-MHz Cube (with a DVD player) with just 32 MB of RAM. I then dropped in two 256-MB RAM chips I picked up for next to nothing. Putting RAM in myself was much cheaper than getting a model with more RAM from Apple. It runs Mac OS X, has a 17" Apple Studio Display, 20 GB Hard Drive, 576 MB RAM. I use the BSD UNIX layer in OS X for editing in LaTeX (using TeXShop and teTeX) so I really do make full use of the OS.
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My next computer (and this will be at least next summer, if not significantly beyond – don't worry Mum!) will be a 
In 1995 when I was on a Training For Work course in Print Journalism in Glasgow I used Macs every day for about five months. I really got used to Photoshop and QuarkXPress. However, when I got a job as a Production Editor I ended up using PCs every day and never went near a Mac for a long time. Windows by this point was quite similar to the Mac OS in appearance and so the transition was relatively easy. Over time I lost my Mac-savvy.
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