I’m planning to buy a desktop in the near future. But what kind of desktop, I’m not very clear. The reasons for getting a desktop, however, are very clear:
* I can’t live without the expandibility, especially in the storage dimension.
* I do too many things that require fast disks and fast CPUs, which laptops aren’t very good at. Conversely, I never take my laptop anywhere, which laptops are very good at.
My big dilemma right now, is what platform to go with, or rather, Mac or PC. Here, I feel like my experience tells me that I should consider my use cases. I’ll list them by priorities like we do at work:
# P1 Photo processing
# P1 Web development
# P1 Standard tasks: web surfing, email, IM, working from home
# P1.2 Playing around with keyboards
# P2 Running vmware / tinkering with linux distros
# P2 Messing around with software/technologies in a way that’s beneficial to my career
It’s all about balancing these with costs. I’ll have to wait to see what Apple announces, but my hunch is that I’ll be able to build a pretty fast quad AMD box for cheaper than Apple’s new desktop machines. It’ll be able to do almost everything in the list above, except for maybe the last item, if I define it as “messing around with OS X”. Also the first item might be slightly hindered due to not being ablet o use Aperture (though I’ll probably be OK with whatever Lightroom turns out to be).
Conversely, with an Apple machine, I’ll probably be able to run Windows, and using some virtualization product, I’ll probably be able to mess with Linux distros and such. Using Apple hinders #4 a little, and costs potentially a lot more.
In the end I know I’ll have to wait to see what Apple announces before I make a decision. If I do go with Apple machines, then I’ll have to wait even longer to make sure they can work out the kinks in their first gen machines.
My short term goal should probably be to acquire the E70 phone, and let that distract me long enough until I have more information.