The Mac Years

The trusty emac


As some of you might be aware, I have this old eMac (not the intel one) lying around on my desk in my house. Now, after using it for a couple of days I've gotten hook to it again, clicking it with the at that time so cool 1 button mouse on the docks of it's very interesting and fludic OS. I haven't been using it since a year plus if I'm not mistaken, and usually if I do, i tend to use to check on websites now and then. Additionaly with the VAIO that I'm using at work, I tend to leave this behind to collect dust and it is evident on the keys that i'm typing now. But the Mac didn't failed, it didn't die. It just sat in a corner until it boots up, and it did. Runs just like when I first bought it. :)

The story of how I gotten a Mac was an interesting one. And the followers that have it (yes I'm talking to you Eugin). It all started around 2004 (if I'm not mistaken), where I first found out that the iPod mini has been releasing soon and is taking for preorders. Seeing it in action and seeing how small it was (at that time it was really small), I decided to proceed to MacAsia to preorder one and subsequently gotten the unit and was quite pleased at the design. As time grew by I started visiting MacAsia more to learn on the iPod (i know it's supposed to be easy but being a techie I needed to know if there are any tricks that we can use), and this particular machine caught my eyes. It was a egg shaped machine called the eMac and it looks like an aesthetically beautiful machine that it's display also seems so much more clearer than my PC that I have in the house. Compared to the iBooks at the time, the emac was technically faster abit and also was brighter than the iBooks. It looked quite cool, and it didn't help that the Mac guy was saying that it's a beautiful machine in the world and faster than any PCs on the planet. And it was cheap. For RM3699, it was a steal as a Mac was usually expensive. So I brought out my cash and paid for it.

As I was going to pay for the machine, my friend Eugin was tagging along to see what the Mac was about. He kept saying for the price you pay you could get a horrendous powerful PC that can be placed in your house, which I dismissed by saying it was beautiful ( at that time this was very different than what I used to be , as I used to be talking about getting the best spec machine for the buck, and sometimes I still do today ). So off we went to MacAsia and bought one of the units and got the sales guy to help us bring it to the parking lot.

It needed the sales guy, which we found out the first disadvantage. It was heavy. It's 10kg in weight and it's horrendously hard to bring it from one place to another. The other disadvantage was it's size, though I think it's the box that's maybe the issue. It couldn't fit at the back of Eugin's Proton Satria as it couldn't wedge thru the gap to the back seat. So ultimately I had to sit at the back while the emac had been seatbelted to the front seat.

Once I got back home with the emac, lugging it upstairs was a pain. I had to make 3 rests during the time I climbed the stairs jus to be able to get it to the table. But the setup, flawless. There's 4 components. The emac itself, the keyboard, the mouse and the power plug. Plug everything together and start it up. Everything is there all the OS has already been ready. And it was good to go. And it was beautiful. More beautiful that any of the machines that I've worked on before.

Afer a while, Eugin who was initially a PC supportor, started buying Mac things to. First he gotten the iBook, then the keyboard and the mouse (which was weird since the iBook has already a keyboard and a trackpad, and also the keyboard itself costs RM299 and the mouse costs RM199, horrendously expensive), the iPod mini, the USB fan cooler, the Airport Express and more. It was a Mac year at that time.

Well, why did it stopped after the following years? Well, we found out that because it's a Mac, it's hard for us to customise controls since it was built on a Unix based OS, so we're not sure if we know or even dare to tinker on it. The speed also was not as fast as some if not most of the PCs at that time. Playing warcraft 3 with your friends on Battlenet makes you lag as your computer cannot keep up with the high graphic requirements which you could easily afford with the price of the PC. And an interesting discovery when I first entered (if) interactive was that the Macs, which used to be a designers required tool, seem to have lagged in terms of Macromedia Flash performance, so the guys are not able to build it and test it on a Mac, coz it won't show the performance and hence lagged behind. Eventually with new sophisticated PCs in the market and the unknown of the Macs going into Intel, the eMac eventually sat at the corner of the desk, peacefully quiet, to make room for new PCs and notebooks that has come to my path.

After having grouses with Microsoft Windows Vista however, I kept looking at this eMac and I started finding out that open source tools are on the Mac as well. I've optimised it with some tools that I've found on the Internet and most if not all of them are free. While I'm writing this blog on the emac, it feels simple and nice. And then it occurred to me. This was the ONLY machine that I bought that wasn't based on hardcore spec. It was because everything was simple. No convoluted jargons on whats happening, no intricate shortcut keys to press, just drag and drop everywhere. It was simple, and that was what the eMac had done for me for that 1 year.

I'm thinking of another Mac year again, hows that for a change?