No, not that itch.
I’m referring to the fact that I am now in the part of my 2-year circadian cycle where I want to buy a Mac again. It’s been a long time since I had the Powerbook, and there have been several developments since then that make me think things will be a little better this time around.

• iPhone: No matter how I look at it, I can’t see myself going with a blackberry instead of an iPhone in the future. I waited to see the Storm, and the Storm sucked. Sure it might get a little better, but I don’t think it will get better enough.
  The only thing that the Blackberry still has over the iPhone is mail search. On the other hand iPhone now has a better SDK, better builtin apps (like youtube, street view, and photos), and a better development trajectory. Once I get the iPhone, then I know I’m going to get sucked in to the rest of it. I’ll want iTunes (of course), then I’ll say iTunes runs better on a Mac, or I can only dabble with the iPhone SDK on a Mac, etc. etc.
• Fusion: With the Powerbook, running windows stuff was totally out of the question. Well, there was VirtualPC, but it sucked, and it sucked hard and slow. Nowadays, Fusion keeps getting better and better, and it is certainly enough to fill all the little gaps.
• Exchange support: Hopefully, if my company finally switches off of Exchange, this won’t matter. But until then, this has always been one area where using a Mac sucked. Fusion makes it a little better, and Apple officially supporting it will make it a lot better. And they did it pretty well for the iPhone, so hopefully they won’t fuck it up too bad for Mail.app.

Oh yea, there’s also that other reason of now I have a real reason to want to not spend as much time dicking around on the computer at home. If possible, I’d like to focus on producing content in various ways, which I hear Macs are pretty good for. The amount of time I’ve spent recently trying to produce an h.264-encoded video for smugmug to consume has been just short of a debacle. (Sure, Win7 might make things a little bit better, but I still get the feeling that Win7 is still going to be Windows, and not in the good way).