View from the Mountain

The Epson ET-3760, No More Inkjet Cartridges for Me

My deep dive into technology stretches back nearly thirty-nine years to August of 1982, when I got an Apple II+ computer and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. I am guessing the computer, printer and some software cost something over $3,000 US. That same $3,000 translates into about $8,400 in purchasing power today.

Printing and computing technology has gotten less costly instead of increasing expensive. Both technologies have also gotten much more capable. Today’s inkjet printer can print faster with much higher quality results than the Epson MX-80 of 1982. I had to have an Orange Micro Grappler + parallel interface card just to take advantage of the printer on the Apple II. Even so, some of the early word processing software required inserting control characters to get the printer to print bold or italics characters. On my first Apple II+ I installed a Videx keyboard enhancer just to be able to see upper and lower case letters on the monochrome monitor that I had.

The idea that one printer without a specialized card would work across a bunch of computers was as foreign an idea as having a printer that can scan and copy items plus print perfectly acceptable photos.

We are eons ahead of where we were in 1982, in computer technology, and but we have come even further in cross-platform printing abilities in the seventeen years since I wrote this article about the work required to print from my 2004 Linux computer. I bought my first All In One printer in 2006. At the time it was even a challenge getting it to print from my Macs. The HP AIO Photosmart C6180 never died on me, but I did replace it with a smaller Cannon TS9100 AIO printer a couple of years ago. I was having challenges using the C6180 on some computers.

This year just as I was getting ready to purchase my third set of ink for the Cannon it dawned on me that if I made that order for $40 of ink, I would be very close to paying as much for ink supplies as I had paid for the printer. While the only other complaint I had about the TS9100 was its flimsy paper tray, I decided that I would get off the inkjet-cartridge-addiction train. As Joanna Stern says in her WSJ article, The Best Printers for the Home—Say Goodbye to Ink Cartridges, “The only time an old-school, cheap cartridge inkjet makes sense is if you need to print a page here and there. Say, a return label once a month.” While I don’t print a whole lot and I  have a Dymo label printer, I print enough to think that 18 months of ink supplies should not cost more than my inkjet printer.

When it came to choosing a printer, I went with an Ethernet equipped Epson ET-3760. It was under $299 tax included, delivered to my doorstep by Costco. Filling the ink tanks was mess-free because of the special ink bottles. Like both of my previous AIOs, the printer manufacturer photo software is worthless. However, I use Lightroom so I am more picky than most people.

In order to get fully functionality (scanning and printing) with my main Mac OS and Windows 10 machines, I downloaded the software but there were no hitches or glitches. I have both M1 and I5 based based Macs running everything from Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.6 to macOS Big Sur 11.2.3. For some reason the printer just worked from my 2010 iMac running High Sierra. We have three Windows machines running Windows 10. The oldest would be six years old. We also have a repurposed I5 Lenovo desktop from 2015 that runs Ubuntu Linux. In the surprise of surprises the Linux machine printed to the new Epson without me doing anything but selecting the Epson when I went to print. My wife and I both use Chromebooks for our evening browsing. My wife’s Lenovo Chromebook and my Asus Flip C434 both have had no problems printing to the new printer. On top of that my Google Pixel 2XL smartphone prints to it as does my new iPad Pro.

I have more operating systems and architectures printing without any problems to the Epson ET-3760 than I have ever had. I am actually amazed at how easy it was for the Epson to join our challenging group of hardware. Printing has never been this easy in my complex world of computers.

The scanning software also works well. I have printed a few 4X6 photos and the quality is fine though it is maybe not quite as easy to switch paper sizes as it was on the Canon.

This is a long way from the days when we used to flip dip switches on cards to get printers to work and sometimes even make custom cables. I still have a dedicated scanner and a black and white laser printer so I might not push the Epson ET-3760 as hard as someone who has no other printers, but I will try to report back on how long the original ink supply lasts. I will use it quite a bit for color printing since I have found it hard to get my color HP LaserJet CP1025nw to print using some of my computers.

Even ten years ago I doubt that I could have imagined that for $670 before taxes I could have both a very capable computer, my ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 2 in 1 Laptop, 14” Touchscreen FHD NanoEdge Display, Intel Core m3-8100Y Processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC Storage ($390 -June Prime Day Special before taxes) and a terrific multi-funtional Epson ET-3760 inkjet printer with Ethernet ($280 before taxes).

Empowering Technology

Technology that empowers you is more than just cool stuff.  To be really successful, technology has to be affordable, easy to use, and capable of accomplishing important tasks which were previously difficult to do.

I was working for Apple Canada and living in Halifax, Nova Scotia in January 1985 when Apple introduced the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be widely used. Ignoring the first home computers, this was the first time I was involved with the rollout of technology that had the power to fundamentally change the way we did things.

The list price was $6,995 and more important to those of us lugging it around for demonstrations, it weighed 77 pounds. Networking, called AppleTalk, which came with it reduce the per user price to something reasonable.

I was happy that my previous career was running a cattle farm where I spent much of the winter hauling around 100 lb+ bags of feed.

It is a measure of how technology accelerates that in December 2011, just about twenty-six years later, I bought a Brother HL-2270DW laser printer for $99.98.  It only weighed 15.4 pounds.

The original Apple LaserWriter printed eight pages per minute of 300 DPI text and graphics using a 12 Mhz Motorola 68000 chip.

The Brother printer that I bought in 2011 printed at 27 pages per minute at up to 2400 X 600 DPI.  It had a 200 Mhz processor.  The Brother printer came with Ethernet and wireless connectivity.  The Apple LaserWriter only had LocalTalk, a very slow but revolutionary network for 1985.

The original LaserWriters were heavy and expensive. Few of them made it into home offices in the early days. The most recent Brother Laser 2360DW that I purchased was only $85. The printing resolution is the same bit it now prints at 32 PPM and has wireless, Ethernet and USB connectivity.

Even more important to the success than the hardware of the original LaserWriters was the software that had been developed to work with them. As is still the case today, great hardware is only as good as the software that runs on it.  Pagemaker and Illustrator allowed people to create documents that had never been created on the desktop by office workers. What was a revolution in 1985 is an often-unappreciated part of today's office life.

I still remember doing a demonstration for educators in Fredericton, New Brunswick in the fall of 1985. I was about five minutes into the demonstration of a pre-release version of Adobe Illustrator.  There were twenty or so people in the room. When I glanced around the room about half already had their mouths open.  That is what happens when disruptive technology gets in front of people who are smart enough to recognize it and see the future.

The LaserWriter and desktop publishing were not the last disruptive technology that I got to witness in my technology career which will hit four decades next year.  It has been an amazing ride. I suspect there is lots more to come.

This list of technology that has changed lives is longer my short list. Here in no particular order other than how it has stuck in my mind is my list.

1. The graphical interface as epitomized by the original Macintosh was a revolution to those of us who started out with green screens and arrow keys. It was what drew me to Apple. It was revolutionary and we are still seeing its continued impact.
2. One piece of software that has had as much or more impact than a lot of fancy software that has disappeared is the spreadsheet. Lotus 123, Microsoft Mulitplan, and eventually Excel changed the way that we look at numbers. We felt like the Macintosh was a real computer when Microsoft released Multiplan for the 128K Mac. It ran on 3.5-inch floppy disks.
3. The ever-increasing size and speed of computer storage is also a revolution but it happened over time. The first 5 meg Profiles that I carried around were worth $3,500 US. I recently paid $87.99 for a SanDisk 500GB Extreme Portable SSD. 
4. The writable CD-ROM and even the DVD had huge but transitory impacts on us all.  Everything is in the cloud now.
5. Wi-Fi was a gamble at first and sometimes a pain to get working. Apple's first Airport Wi-Fi was not cheap in 1999. Wi-Fi is everywhere now, plus it is inexpensive and easy to use.
6. Even more important than WiFi is the Internet. As company, Apple, got on the Internet seriously around 1993.  The Internet is a huge part of our lives today. Just as important as the physical connection is what we can do on the Internet which has gone well beyond exchanging messages. The original iMac set a standard for making it easy to get on the Internet.
7. Digital cameras were another technology that changed lives. We used our first digital cameras, the Apple Quicktake, on a digital scavenger hunt at the Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia around 1993.  Little did we know how big digital photography would become.  With digital photographs came iPhoto, editing photos and storing them on the web.  Even now Google photos are part of my life every day.

I could also add fiber to the home, FTTH, but I do that for a living and today far too few people are enable to take advantage of it like I do.

It would be easy to add Smartphones.  However, in a way, they are a bunch of revolutionary technologies crammed into a small form factor. I like the individual technologies better than Smartphones. Perhaps one of my favorite examples of revolutionary technologies crammed into something small, light, and inexpensive is the Chromebook.  

The summer of 2021 with tax I paid $416.33 for an ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 2 in 1 Laptop, 14" Touchscreen FHD NanoEdge Display, Intel Core m3-8100Y Processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC Storage, Backlit Keyboard, Silver. It has a built-in camera and WiFi.  It wakes instantly (faster than my MacBook Pro) and the battery never lets me down.

I once sold an Apple IIe with a 5 meg Corvus hard drive for over $19,000. That included a dot matrix printer and a daisywheel printer.  It was before the day of LaserWriter.  My $416 Chromebook easily prints to either my color HP Laser Printer, my color Epson Ink Jet or my monochrome Brother LaserWriter.  All of the printers plus the Chromebook computer did not cost $1,000.  That is empowering, transforming technology.

 

 

 

We Were Barn Builders Once

We moved to our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the fall of 1975.  We bought a few cows and they were housed in the old style barn that came with the farm.  That spring I went to Manitoba and Saskatchewan and bought a trailer truck load of cows. I had no intention of wintering that many cows in an old style barn. We got a couple of estimates to build a barn. We decided to build a couple of barns ourselves.

While I had learned a lot about working with my hands since I graduated from college, building a barn was not one of those skills. Living on a farm teaches you quickly do what needs to be done even if means learning how to do something new. I ordered all the materials that we needed from Ontario.  They were shipped by rail to New Brunswick and then delivered by truck to our farm. The trusses for the barns were 36 ft. long and the others for the other barn were 36 ft. Even getting those trusses unloaded was not easy but it is amazing what you can do with a couple of farm tractors with front-end loaders.

It was harder getting a crew together but a couple of older neighbors agreed to help the two alternative life-style individuals that I hired. They had both come to Canada to get away from American life. I did not care about anything other than they were smart and hard workers. I started by digging a trench four-feet deep as straight as possible for 128 feet. We followed recommendations and made concrete pads to go under each of the four by six pressure treated poles. It was the last time we put pads under poles.

It turned out the instructions we were following were written for building barns in rock-free Ontario soils. New Brunswick soils were mostly rock. There was little danger of them sinking. After the first trench, I decided that we would dig holes with large hydraulic-powered auger mounted on a front-end loader. The advantage of having it on a front-end loader is that I could put down pressure on the auger with the loader so that it would dig more efficiently in the rocky soil. Once the poles were set, we used a tractor-mounted concrete mixer to pour concrete around the poles.

Once the posts were in the ground, it was just a lot of chain saw carpentry cutting the posts off to the same heights. Then we put plates on either sides of the poles. Then the trusses were put in place one at a time. The first truss was the hardest since there wasn't a lot to brace it with when it was first lifted up. By the time I built the second barn, I had figured out how to improve the construction so that the first truss really was no longer a problem. If you look closely at this picture of the construction of our second barn you can see we put longer posts at the end of the building. 

Beyond all the strapping that goes on a pole barn, the hardest thing is putting on the big sheets of galvanized roofing. Often you are way in the air and the only thing keeping you from slipping is the head of a nail. The second barn also got extensions on both sides.  We ran out of pressure treated wood so we used cedar posts that came from trees cut off the farm. 

The first barn was finished by Thanksgiving (American) 1975.  I put the last steel on the barn door before I had any turkey. There a lot of other things that went into making the barns functional like getting electricity to them and of course water. We had to drill a well. I used the backhoe to build a small underground building around the well so I could keep it going in the brutal New Brunswick winters. I dug trenches to put frost free hydrants at both barns.

The finished barns had dimensions of 128 ft. by 36 ft. for the first barn and 69 ft. by 64 ft. for the second one. When I visited the farm back in 2012, both barns were still in good shape in spite of no real maintenance since 1984 when we moved from the farm. They were the only barns that I ever built.

It took at least of couple of years to get the interiors of the barns done so that they met the needs of our growing cattle herd.  It was a lot of work but the new barns, a round baler and big farm tractors allowed me to run a cattle operation with 65 or so calving females before we decided to change careers.  At our peak before our dispersal in 1982, we had 200 head of Angus, both red and black. The open style barns gave us a very healthy herd of cattle. In the nearly ten years we farmed, we never had a vet visit the farm. We probably had well over three hundred calves in that time.

 

 

A Worthy Sensibility

A life lived without passions for ideas or other people is a boring existence. 

However, a life lived with a fiery passion for things or ideas without respect for others and their opinions is a self centered life which damages the humanity of those which it touches.

There are some things which are central to my being. I believe that helping others achieve their reasonable goals in life is a good way to live. I strive to make any relationship or place where my presence has been felt better for my having been there.  After over sixty years, I am enough of a realist to know that this will not always happen.

People interpret things differently.  Often people hear different things when others speak or even read the same words and come up with different meanings.  Just look at the Second amendment. Its vague wording taken out of the context of time is something that people are willing to fight about hundreds of years later.

It is not just words on paper or the Internet that can drive people to disagreement. In our material world people can get very emotional about things.  We all have a bias towards things we like or perhaps the ones which have an important place in our lives.

I have raised Angus cattle, sold Vermeer round balers, and worked at Apple selling their computers.  To effectively sell a product, you need to believe in it and it is actually best if you know the product through using it yourself.

When I chose to raise Angus cattle while living the Canadian Maritimes, I did not pick the most popular breed in the area. I actually picked the breed which I thought would help me be successful.  Angus have a hard won reputation as cows which produce calves that need little or no assistance.  It turned out in the ten years that we had cattle, we probably had over five hundred calves born in our woods.  I might have helped two or three calves be born. We had the vet on a farm a couple times for a sick animal.  Angus lived up to their reputation for us.

Similarly I picked Vermeer balers for their reputation for quality and dependability. They worked well for me, and I sold several to other people. I could sell them easily because like most other Vermeer dealers I used the balers in our own operation. I used round balers at time when provincial agriculture people painted those of us using them as crazy.  When I traveled back to New Brunswick in the fall of 2012, thirty years after we sold all our cattle, I found every remaining cattle farmer using round balers.

When I went to work for Apple computer in 1984, I had already been selling computers, both Apples and PCs, for a couple of years.  The Macintosh had been on the market for a few months when I joined Apple.  I thought the Mac with its graphical user interface and WSIWYG display was a better way for computer users to get their work done.  I stayed at Apple nearly twenty years, but along the way a lot changed, computers became more similar than dissimilar.  I learned that in some environments people were very happy with their Windows computers.

Also during my time selling Apple computers, I ran into users who were so in love with the Macintosh and the whole idea of Apple that they made our job of selling Macintoshes into the enterprise harder not easier.  Some of them pushed the Macintosh so relentlessly that CIOs did not even want to hear the word Macintosh.  These lovers of Macs were perhaps the first "fanboys" that I encountered.

While I might have disagreed with a neighbor's choice of Hereford cattle instead of Angus, we were still neighbors and cattlemen.  We were more alike than different.  Similarly if someone bought an International or John Deere Round baler, we were all still considered crazy by the department of agriculture and besides that I had both John Deere and International tractors on our farm.

No long ago I had an idea that revolved around the supposition that most Apple users will pretty well blindly follow Apple wherever it leads.  The second part of the idea was that Apple users have a fundamentally different relationship with Apple than Microsoft users have with Microsoft. 

I backed my thoughts up with Apple users who are used to the idea that if there is a problem with their computer or iPhone, they are actually the cause of the problem. While I overstated my case to make a point, I do find that many Apple users are less demanding of Apple than Microsoft users are of Microsoft.  Fortunately there is a wide range of users in both camps.  There are some vocal Apple ones and also some acquiescent Microsoft ones.

My idea did not go anywhere, but it was one of things that just are not worth fighting over.  Who really cares whether or Apple users are more like sheep than Microsoft users.  Even if I made the argument would anyone remember it a couple years from now? The answer of course is no. It was only a thought and I did not care to fight over it.

Of course many things you write about are that way. Unfortunately people take them far more seriously.

There are those who are so in love with an iPhone or an iPad, that the slightest hint their products are not worthy of worship brings out a personal attack on the writer.  As is often the case, the worst comments are from those whose identities are usually at best hidden behind an online moniker and at worst "anonymous." While I have written about this issue before in the "The not so amazing lack of civility on the web," it still bothers me that I can be attacked as a person for something as simple as an opinion about a product.

Surely we have become civilized enough to agree that the happiness in your life is not dependent on whether you are using iOS or Android as your tablet or smartphone operating system. Isn't it possible that my opinion might be worth thoughtful consideration instead of condemnation?

Even if I might disagree with you on the second amendment, perhaps I am entitled to my opinion without verbal abuse from someone else.  It is just an opinion, I have not tried to have my thoughts turned into law.

If we end up living in a society where no one can disagree with a vocal minority or even majority, haven't we let ourselves become less civilized?

John Biggs offers some advice in his Agony of the Fanboy,

" Maybe you’re wrong. Understand this when you attack someone for what they’ve written: maybe they’re right."

And I would say amen to this from John.

"Let’s not fight. There’s beer to drink. There are people to woo and befriend. There are songs to be sung and board games to play."

And then I might add...

There is bread to bake, steaks to cook, along with miles of beaches and hundreds of square miles of water to explore. Let us not forget all the birds to watch and photograph and that there are a few fish left to chase and catch. Finally, I would rather end up your friend than your enemy.

 

A Thoughtful Technology Refresh

I have owned computers since 1982 when I bought my first Apple II+.  Over the years, computers got old and new ones took their place.   Often the monitors and the printers would last longer, but even they eventually needed to be replaced.

As computer prices have fallen and new devices have been introduced, we feel tremendous marketing pressure to upgrade to the latest and greatest products.  After a life working in technology, I am likely more addicted to new stuff than most people.

For twenty years a career at Apple gave me a source of the latest and greatest techno-tools.  I won one of the first iPads off the production line in a sales contest. There was always an employee promo where I could buy a slightly old product at a bargain basement price.

The problem was that I ended up with a basement full of old computers.  The way the world of technology works, even the best of them eventually have to be retired because manufacturers stop supporting them in the hopes that you will buy something new.

Starting in 2004 a series of Apple products that did not exhibit Apple's legendary longevity got me thinking about technology in a different way.  If technology was only going to last eighteen to twenty months like my 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4, why buy the most expensive?

My next laptop from Apple was a white MacBook.  While it also had to go back to the factory for repair, at least it broke while under warranty and was less expensive.  A couple of hard drive transplants helped keep the MacBook going for five years.  During that five years I also learned that I could accomplish just about everything I needed to do with an even less expensive Windows laptop.

When the MacBook started dying it got replaced by a 15" Lenovo I7 laptop that cost less than half the price of an equivalent Mac laptop.  At the same time my MacBook was dying, my iMac, otherwise known as my iLemon, was also in its death throes.

I managed to keep the iLemon limping along for several months by running it off an external drive.  While I was battling to keep the iMac going, I came close to leaving the Mac platform.  I finally decided that there were a few reasons to continue using a Mac so I recently took delivery of the cheapest Mac that I could find.

My new Mac is Apple's bottom end MacMini.  True to Apple's form, it might be the low end model, but it is still not inexpensive.  The MacMini listed for $599 and did not even come with a keyboard, mouse or a DVD drive.  The Lenovo tower that I bought the same week cost only $499 and came with a hard drive twice the size, twice the memory, a DVD drive, and they threw in a nice keyboard and mouse.  The Lenovo tower is replacing my dual G5 Mac which just celebrated its eighth birthday last December.  I still use it, but there is no longer a current browser available for it so its uses are minimal and mostly limited to Photoshop which I don't want to buy again.

The MacMini got attached to the eight year old flat panel screen that originally came with the dual G5.  The Lenovo tower got hooked up to a three year old Dell LCD screen.  It is hard to believe that I am managing to use these computers without a single Apple Retina display.  The two new computers join a Dell Pentium III system that was purchased in September of 2004.  It is running Ubuntu Linux and fortunately the Linux folks value older hardware so I have a good set of current browsers on it.

Together my two new computers cost a couple of hundred dollars less than the price of a single new iMac.  My iLemon is the last all in one computer that we will purchase.  Adding video connectors so dead iMacs can be used as monitors later won't change my mind.  I am done with products like the iMac.

iMacs are hard to service and are typically hard to upgrade.  The iLemon was our family's eighth iMac.  I think only one is still running.  The others all had to be replaced and all those still working and beautiful CRTs and flat panel screens went to recycling.  It is something that I regret.

This whole disposable technology thing puts us all in some interesting situations.  Just a year ago I ended up buying a new laser printer because it was cheaper to buy a new printer than to gamble that a new cartridge would solve the problems on my old printer.

I have no plans to abandon technology which plays a big part in my life.  I'm just planning to be a lot smarter about it.  I'm happy to say that both the new MacMini and the Lenovo are working well with our HP Inkjet which is over six years old.  They also like my $99 laser printer.

The manufacturers of televisions are pushing hard to sell these new smart TVs.  I'm hoping to add a few features to our six year old television for around $100.  If Apple ever comes out with their new super smart television, you can bet it will be super expensive.  I won't be waiting in line for it either.  I don't watch enough TV to care what kind of screen technology that we have. To me a smart TV is one that is turned off when I want some peace and quiet.

My new goal is to get the most technology bang for my limited dollars.  Most technology devices don't get used to their full potential anyway. There is generally a lot that can be done even with some of the less expensive products on the market.

I suspect there is very little that anyone can do on their iPad that I can't do on my $199 Nexus 7.  On top of spending fewer dollars, if I can send less technology stuff to recycling, I will sleep better at night.

 

Time to look back over the years of posts

I found the Typepad platform nearly eight years ago in late November 2004.  My first post was entitled, My Welcome to Windows, and was done on November 23, 2004.  After leaving Apple in July of 2004, I wanted to get outside the reality distortion zone and taste the world of Windows.  Being the adventurous type, I decided to get Linux up and running at the same time.

Eight years later I'm still writing about technology and giving Apple advice like my recent post, Apple Finally Loses Its Mantra. The post seemed to be the natural result of a weekend where I figured out that things no longer just work on my Mac.

During my nearly twenty years at Apple, I loved techical challenges even after I became a manager in 1993.  System engineers loved to work for me because I usually understood what they were saying, and I tried my best to give them all the tools they needed to do their jobs.  My team was the only one that I ever heard of in Apple that had its own internal web site.  I built the website and used it to keep all of us accountable and informed.

Learning another operating system and using Windows XP was not that difficult, but I did have some adventures. The challenges of Windows gave me some very good perspective to launch into a battle with a local technology writer in December 2004 when he provided some inaccurate information about the Mac.  My article, The Computer Battle, was reasonable advice for computer shoppers at the time.

Over the years I have written over 1,400 posts on View from the Mountain and  more than another 1,000 on other sites that I maintain.  Several of the posts have offered advice on buying computers like that early post. Some have poked fun at computers and politics. I have often written about why I continue to use the Mac and about some of the challenges that I have conquered.

A few have even been a glimpse of my own thinking as I tried to decide which computer to buy. This post, The Apple Value Proposition, was written in February of 2006 when I was vice president of sales and marketing for Webmail.us before Rackspace bought them up. 

I finally got most things working for my Mac in that career, but when I headed off to the coast of North Carolina and decided to sell real estate for a while, using a Mac became much more difficult though I remained very optimistic for much of the first year.  The MacBook that I bought in the summer of 2006 was a constant companion that first year in real estate.

By the fall of 2007, I made the decision to buy another Windows laptop since I had given my Dell laptop to my daughter as she finished her business degree.  By the spring of 2008, I was calling Vista a quagmire.  Still I hung with it for over two years, and surprisingly saw a great deal of improvement.

As January 2010 rolled around, my wife needed a new computer.  I was ready to replace her ancient 12" Aluminum Powerbook with a new Mac laptop.  However, I was determined that she not get a processor that was already out of date when it shipped.  Finally I got really frustrated with Apple delaying the introduction of systems with the new Intel processors.  I took advantage of a really good deal at Staples.  I got my wife an I5 HP laptop and myself an I7 HP laptop.  The total cost of the two Windows 7 machines was under $1,500.  They turned out to be great machines from the start and even a year later I was still pleased with them.

In the fall of 2010, I had a project that required a Mac so I ended up buying an I5 iMac.  I was a little irritated with Apple from the start because I had to get the 27" screen to get the I5.  The I5 iMac has turned out to be one of my least favorite Macs.  It suffered from "Slow Snow Leopard" and has never been a quick booting machine. The iMac has lost the ability to boot from its internal drive and is now running from an external Firewire 800 drive.  I haven't built up the energy to pull the LCD to replace the drive.  Every time I think of it, I want to strangle the Apple engineer who agreed to no drive access door on the back of the iMac.

As my MacBook got older and older, I kept waiting for Apple to come out with a price competitive laptop.  It didn't happen so as the white MacBook was dying a slow death in the spring of 2012, I bought a new Lenovo I7 laptop.  My HP laptop is now a backup machine, but it is not nearly as nice as the Lenovo.  The 15" Lenovo even with 8 gigs of RAM, the I7 processor, and a copy of Microsoft Office was less money than the least expensive Mac laptop.

As I write this, my 2004 Dual G5 which I bought in the winter of 2004 is still functional though the browser versions are mostly out of date and unsupported.  The Dell that I bought in the fall of 2004 is still happily running Linux.  I have moved over to Ubuntu and find it a delight compared to the early Linux versions.  We no longer have a functioning Mac laptop in the family for the first time in many years.

Unfortunately every time I look at Mac laptops the math just doesn't work for me.  I have watched as I have been priced out of both laptops and towers in the Apple world.   I'll likely spend around $1,200 in total for a new laptop and a new tower this fall.  I want something lighter than my Lenovo to carry on a trip when I need something more than my Kindle Fire.  I also need to replace my aging Dual G5.

I wouldn't mind stretching a little and spending a few hundred dollars more if I could get a Mac besides the mini and a laptop besides the MacBook Air.  The $999 version of the MacBook Air doesn't even have a SD slot.  Unfortunately it would cost me at least $1,800 or 50% over my budget to get the lowest end Macs that fit my relatively modest needs. And one of the them would have to be a Mac Mini.  Based on my recent experience, paying more when I am not necessarily getting more reliable hardware doesn't make a lot of sense even though I still love Macs.  Unfortunately I also am not overly enthralled with Mac OS X Mountain Lion and iCloud is worth exactly what I pay for it.

Sadly, I have to admit the Mac has gone from being the computer for the rest of us to the computer for the well-heeled among us.

My most recent advice on buying computers and technology can be found at this post, Technology Still Needs Humans.  It won't be long and it will be time to update that article.  I wonder what will be my next technology adventure- Windows 8? I am hoping that it is not a disaster as some are suggesting.

I am hoping that my Mac experience will improve, but it is hard to get excited about Apple stuff when you keep battling problems.  I have now reinstalled iPhoto three times on my iMac.