The End of an Era

This is what my old Powerbook looks like (though with considerably more wear and tear)

About eight years ago, I purchased a titanium Apple Powerbook. The laptop was a work of art. My classmates frequently commented on how beautiful the machine was. And it was fast, at the time. It made our old Power Mac desktop seem like a dinosaur. And it opened up all sorts of capabilities that I had never experienced before. I started editing videos and then burning them to DVDs. Of course, there were a few shortcomings with the computer. When I purchased it, I upgraded to the larger 20 gigabyte hard drive. It didn't take long to run out of room once I started doing larger video projects. Then eventually our DVD burning software ceased to work and I had to hack iDVD (Apple's DVD-authoring software) to get it to recognize an external DVD burner. And of course, the older it got, the slower it seemed.

Eventually we finally made the decision to buy and new iMac for home use. The switch has been wonderful, but I still found myself using the Powerbook from time to time. I took the laptop with me when I went on away rotations so I could stay in touch by email, and occasionally Mason will want me to pull it out so we can connect the two computers and we can play Age of Empires II together.

At work I have grown increasingly frustrated with the computers that are provided to us. Most of the anesthesia department is outfitted with Lenovo Thinkpad netbooks. In spite of the fact that they are new, they are slow—very slow. The screens are so slow that everyone is provided with a dock and a larger monitor, so you can actually see what is going on. The netbooks are portable, but they don't have CD drives and we are not allowed to use flash drives to move documents around. As a staff anesthesiologist at a residency program, one of my duties is to give lectures to the residents. I have watched more than one staff struggle as they have tried to find a way to pull up their lectures, and the thought of preparing a Powerpoint lecture on that small, slow machine was almost more than I could bear. I finally decided I was going to do my presentations on my Powerbook. Even if it wasn't the fastest way of doing things, I figured at the very least that I could make sure that the presentation would work on my machine and then just hook it up to the projector. I had done this in the past and it had worked out fairly well.

When I was discussing my situation with Teressa last night she suddenly said, "Why don't you go order yourself a new laptop." Well, how can you argue with that? Besides, we had always planned to purchase a new laptop before I get deployed so we can talk over the Internet. I'm just buying it a little early. So I put in the order last night for a new 13-inch Macbook Pro with extra RAM (4 gigabytes) and an upgraded hard drive (320 gigabytes). Now I should have the capability to make great presentations, and do a few other fun things on the side.