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Longtime Apple users are living in a strange and unfamiliar world these days. Not long ago, one or two major beige or black product releases a year and an incremental OS update would be enough good news to send the masses into ecstasy. Given the scarcity of good news, even the mundane could get top billing. The press devoted endless column-inches of text explaining how Mac OS 8.1 was a significant improvement over 8.0 because Apple finally released all the parts of its operating system simultaneously on a single CD-ROM. That was then. Now, after several years of watching Jobs pull fresh goodies out of his rainbow-colored bag of tricks every few months, it is more difficult to generate some good, old fashioned
I-just-gotta-have-it-now lust.
Do not tell that to the folks who attended the Macworld Expo in New York a few weeks ago. There is nothing like being around sixty thousand of your closest friends swarming over the latest gear to get you thinking that maybe it's time to upgrade, well, everything. The new mouse never needs cleaning and feels a whole lot better than the hockey puck it replaced. The new keyboard with the cool eject button will do everything but automatically respond to email messages. And how about that G4 Cube? No Mac, not even a laptop, will reclaim desk space faster than that quiet little computer. No doubt: the Mac universe has come a long way, baby. Where is my credit card?
A quick peek into my checkbook, and reality overwhelmed my dreams faster than Steve dumped any mention of ATI from his keynote. Right about now lustful heat usually tempers into the warm fuzzy realization: less is more. I guess I will have to wait on that new eighty gigabyte hard drive. Perhaps my solace is that even folks with unlimited budgets cannot buy Mac OS X yet, either. Maybe I should be content to stuff another CPU accelerator inside my monolithic beige Power Mac tower and squeeze eight more months out of my existing equipment.
If I need to hold off on the big hardware, maybe I can pick up a few less expensive software trinkets. First on my list is Power On Software's Rewind, the system-wide disk-write undo utility. Next I can grab a copy of The Sims and practice techniques for working without sleep. I love that espresso machine, but I wish the folks at Maxis had given The Sims a chance to buy a new G4 Cube. For general use applications, Microsoft announced Office 2001, but it will not be available for a new months. So I will make due with one last utility,
CopyAgent.
My life was much simpler when all I had to do was buy an OS upgrade every few years and dream about the future that Apple kept promising. Now that the future is finally here, I need a lot more cash to satisfy my tech-lust. Fast. It is only four more months until Macworld San
Francisco.
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"Today
is Tomorrow Already"
