An All-Mac Family

So, my mom's Dell (about which Blogger once deleted a CAPSLOCK OF RAGE) has died.  It crashed in the middle of re-installing Service Pack 2 and won't boot.  I (stupidly) said that I could hook up the drive to an external hard drive enclosure, add a new hard drive to the computer, and resurrect the files on it.

Fortunately, my mom decided instead that she wanted a Mac Mini.  Patrick has been using my old faithful iBook since I got my PowerBook nearly 4 years ago now, which means that the iBook is -- I think -- close to 7 years old.  He's familiar with the Mac platform, and will be able to more safely use the Internet on a Mac (clicking bad things won't install viruses, for example).

I will still have to put the Dell's hard drive into an external drive enclosure -- it's got several hundred slides I've been slowly scanning, for instance -- and pull over my mom's iTunes library.  But hopefully this is the end of the CAPSLOCK OF RAGE.

That means that between me, my mom, my brother, and my grandfather, among us we have: three Shuffles (1 first gen and 2 second gen), a 1st gen iPod, a 3rd gen iPod, a 5th gen iPod, an iPhone, an iBook, a Titanium PowerBook, a G4 Mini, and a Core Duo Mini.

My dad and grandpa -- both of whom had PCs when they ran off of things that looked like cassette tapes and plugged into your TV -- are either loving that we're geeks or turning over in their graves that we're Mac geeks.

Me, I'm just amused that all of this has resulted from the fact that when I started working as an aide, I bought an iBook so that I could run iTunes, which was the best media player of its kind at the time.

'Course, that's exactly what Apple wants; they even have a name for it -- the Halo Effect.

Edited to add:  I'm an idiot.  I still have Sparky, my faithful PC, that exists solely to run Boardmaker and Writing with Symbols.  Someday, when I get an Intel Mac, Sparky is going away and I'll run XP in Parallels just for those two programs.