In 1994, following one of the rare eruptions of institutional funds to my little skunkworks, we got a pair of 8100s (near-twins: one with 144MB RAM and one with 208—a fortune in those days), and let me tell you, after what we were accustomed to (a Mac SE running 1MB RAM @ 8MHz and a Mac II running 5MB—four-fifths of these purchased on my dime at $45/MB—@ 16MHz), those babies screamed. The 8100/144 died late last year, and its bigger sibling is seldom used; when it is in operation I can practically eat lunch while it runs a Photoshop 3.0 filter, not that it's been asked to do so in living memory. Likewise the workplace 400MHz G3, with half a gig of RAM, pinned me to my swivel chair the first time I took it round the course. Today it's still an OS 9.2 workhorse, and will likely remain so until its noble, much-thrashed hard disk finally falters, but it pulls my brewery wagons, and I do not think of it and the Triple Crown in the same chain of free association.

And so the home machine—thou good and faithful servant; Nunc dimittis indeed!—which I welcomed here three years ago this very month with its processor upgrade and its gig of (ahem!) non-spec RAM (treacherous Panther! Treacherous Apple!), which once made my eyes water with its speed and responsiveness, will be decommissioned early in the coming month. In place of a 500MHz processor transplant I will have a 2GHz dual-core jobbie; in place of a 100MHz system bus I will see 667MHz. The RAM will be faster and doubled (I ordered with 1GB/1 module; have ordered from Crucial Tech a second module). The OS, and most of the applications I'll be running from home (the various Apple "i" suites), will be "Universal Binary," so Rosetta emulation will not be an issue. The others—Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive— will likely perform at least as well on the new hardware under Rosetta as they did on this elderly G4 processor with its tissue rejection issues. Universal Binary editions of the Adobe suite should arrive presently, and will cost me about as much as I would have paid had I not stopped at (respectively) 7, 10, 2 and 6, suspecting even then that the beloved B&W was within sight of its end. I consider myself to have saved two generations of Adobe upgrades (the "CS-1" and "CS-2" suites), regarding which I'd formerly been quite conscientious over the years since 1987, which at about US $600 a pop may certainly be regarded as offsetting a significant fraction of the cost of the new machine.

And of course, given Apple's track record, and notwithstanding all the soothing words—charms against the dreaded "Osborne Effect"—you know and I know that Steve Jobs, that heartless rake, will [adult content follows, and as you know I rarely do this sort of thing, but the context does not merely permit but actually requires it] fuck his G4/G5 user base in the ass with a barbed-wire broomstick as soon as he thinks he can get away with it, so it seems prudent for the sake of my hemorrhoids to shimmy across that bridge-to-the-late-whatever-the-hell-we're-calling-this-decade before those first rectococcygeal thrusts draw blood, know what I'm sayin'?

I trust that I have explained my position (intended to minimize dorsal exposure).

cordially,