This is going to be the last I’ll talk about the iPhone on here, at least until the next major software upgrade. Frankly, at this point, talking about it anymore would be just like, well, cuddling.

My buying advice, for what it’s worth: if you don’t already have one, don’t buy one. You’ve already survived the opening weekend hysteria, so you’ve got the willpower to wait until all the kinks are worked out. There will be a slew of point releases, followed by hardware releases, and version 2.0 will undoubtedly be better.

I still think the thing is plenty cool, and I don’t regret getting it at all. But I had the perfect storm of buyer incentive going on: the Apple monkey on my back, it came out a couple days after my birthday, the price worked out to be 7 shares of Apple stock, my contract on my old phone just ran out a couple of months ago, the battery had already run out, etc. If none of those apply for you, I suggest you wait.

This is definitely a version 1.0 device. “It just works” doesn’t ring true like it does with Macs; there’ve been plenty of occasions when it just doesn’t. The iPod and web browser and mail app crash pretty frequently — it doesn’t harm anything, it just stops playing music, or takes you back to the home screen. When you sync up again, iTunes presents your crash logs and the now-standard “would you like to send valuable feedback to Apple?” dialog box.

You can’t use it for more than a couple of hours without coming up with a list of improvements. It’s neat, but it would be even better if….

And have I mentioned that Apple doesn’t support third-party development for it? Because they don’t. One trivial app that is far from necessary but would be really convenient to have: an equivalent of Vince Lee’s LunchMaster, that could bring up a list of restaurants in a neighborhood, filter them by price and food type, and even choose a random one for you if you wanted. With the iPhone, it could even jump to the corresponding yelp.com entry if you wanted more info, let you call the restaurant, and get a map. But to do any of that, you’d have to have an internet connection, and it’s just not worth it.

On every single one of the ten billion blog posts, message board discussions, and articles written about the iPhone, there’s always, always has one of these comments:

My [existing cellphone type] didn’t cost that much, and it does everything the iPhone does! It’s not as pretty, but it’s functionally the same. There’s nothing revolutionary about this!

Which is completely missing the point. My RAZR phone had a web browser, camera, and media library. I never used them, because they were such a pain in the ass to deal with. A feature that never gets used is not a feature.

That’s why Apple keeps winning and gets away with charging so much for their stuff: because they’re one of the few companies that understands that. It’s not just translucent window borders, and it’s not a GNOME or KDE front-end on the UNIX filesystem, and it’s not Windows Mobile or, God forbid, the Motorola cell phone interface. It’s knowing how people use a device and then making that easier.

When you go to the settings menu on the iPhone, there’s a button that says “Phone.” Press it, and there’s a screen that says “AT&T Services”. And then there’s a screen that shows you all the different kinds of billing and usage information, as well as the corresponding dial code. Apparently I could find my used minutes at any point, even back when I had a RAZR, by dialing *646#. I never knew I could do this, so I never did it. That’s exactly where Apple wins.

Man, there’s been a nauseating level of hype around the iPhone today. (I didn’t include a link; if you want to read more about the iPhone, just check the entire internet). And all for what?

It’s version 1.0 of an Apple device, which means that in around six months there’ll be the next “next big thing” that makes the previous version look like Soviet-era technology. It uses last year’s cellular technology, and by even the most glowing accounts has painfully slow internet access.

There’s no support for third-party development on it; Apple wants to squeeze every last penny it can get out of customers via the iTunes store, and they chose to insult developers by calling their lack of development support “sweet.”

It doesn’t have GPS like other mobile devices do. The camera has no video and no zoom, both of which are supported on my years-old RAZR phone.

I use my phone maybe three times a week, max. Most days I even forget to bring it with me. I don’t have any need for a new one.

Plus Apple’s craftsmanship has been going downhill for a while; broken latches and recalled batteries on the laptops, scratches and battery problems on the iPods, and an OS that seems to be getting less stable as time goes by. My iPod, which is only a few years old (which means there’ve been at least 8 newer versions since I got it) is already giving up the ghost — the battery runs out quickly and at times it refuses to boot up.

Apple’s products are status symbols for a segment of society obsessed with excessive consumerism, a demographic that’s become more and more repulsive the farther we get from the late 1990s. It’s the territory of four-eyed, goateed dorks who think they’re hipsters, driving Volkswagens and listening to the Dave Matthews Band and Jack Johnson and Sheryl Crow on their iPods while still denying they’re yuppies.

All that, not to mention the fact that it’s ridiculous to pay six hundred dollars for a damn cell phone.

Which is why I got the 4GB version instead of the 8GB.

Seriously, you’ve got to see the screen on this thing. You know when they have demo models of PDAs and phones in electronics stores, how they have those printed mock-ups of the real display pasted on the front? The iPhone’s real screen looks like that. I picked one up in the store just to get an idea of the size of it, and was actually surprised when the image on the screen moved.

During my dinner break at work, I stopped by the nearest AT&T store in San Rafael, thinking that few people knew it was even there, so it wouldn’t be crowded. When I got there, there were already around 60 people in line. I joined in for about an hour, and the people were friendly, and the weather was perfect, and I could finally understand why there’s so much hype about waiting in line for the new cell phone or videogame console or Harry Potter book — it’s not even about the product so much about the “event.”

Anyway, that turned out to be a bust, as they sold out after I’d been in line for a little over an hour. I figured I’d had a small taste of the big Day 1 Excitement, so I went back to work and said I’d order one online.

I’m not sure who was driving to the Apple store after I left work; it sure wasn’t me. But the creepily friendly staff standing outside the doors welcomed me and assured me that there were still 4GB models left, and I jumped all over it like Michael Moore on a corndog. I don’t have kids, so it’s not like I need to carry a ton of pictures around with me. And I can’t even think of 1000 songs I’d want to listen to at a moment’s notice. So this, plus the fact that there’s going to be at least a dozen better models released before my contract even runs out, I actually saved money!

And the gadget bloodlust is finally quiet. But for how long?

This video from SarcasticGamer.com has already made the rounds in the real blogs, but it’s just too well-done not to pass on:

You don’t have to have seen the original promotional video to be able to tell that they got the music and the intonation of the voice exactly right. Brilliant.

And to prove this blog’s total lack of bias (in addition to its total lack of content), here’s my other favorite parody of the moment:

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is going on this week, with Steve Jobs’ keynote this morning. Nothing particularly earth-shattering was announced, but the stuff they did show was cool enough.

I was surprised by my own reaction to the new desktop demo. There’s nothing particularly compelling there, and the transparent menubar is unpleasantly Vista-like, but seeing the demo of the new “Stacks” inexplicably filled me with glee. I’ve been looking for something that does exactly that, and the Apple version is plenty slick. Buying OS X upgrades is mandatory in the Spectre Collie household, so I wasn’t looking for anything to convince me to buy Leopard; I was only looking for stuff that made me look forward to it slightly more.

Releasing Safari for Windows was a really welcome announcement. I tried it on my work machine and was amazed that it renders pages exactly the same as it does in OS X. I’d always just assumed ugly font handling was built into Windows and there was no escaping it, but there it is, running in XP and actually looking like I’m using a computer in 2007. The biggest selling point, of course, is that now the entire internet can see Spectre Collie exactly how it was intended to be seen, and the computer world’s long waking nightmare is at last over.

(And yeah, it’s petty, but his whole “Standard Version,” “Ultimate Version” spiel was pretty damn funny. Especially for those of us who’ve been spending time in the Vista trenches).

What’s not cool, though, is the unprecedented level of spin when it comes to the damn iPhone. Sure, Jobs is known across the internets for his “reality distortion field,” but it’s always been in the realm of good-natured criticism. Apple traditionally does a pretty good job with slick new releases that perform pretty well, and then Jobs comes in and then oversells them just a notch. A feature that would’ve just earned a “huh, that’s kind of cool” suddenly gets upgraded to “OMG THAT’S AWESOME WE LOVE YOU STEVE!!!!!!”

But even the reality distortion field can’t turn a turd into a diamond. It’s pretty insulting that they’d even try to. They’ve been roundly criticized for making the iPhone a closed system; it’s simply not a complete smart phone unless third parties can develop applications for it. Jobs held off mentioning the iPhone until the climax of his keynote, and then made the big dramatic announcement: the iPhone has a web browser!

They would’ve been a lot better off not mentioning it at all, because the end result just makes them look silly at best, intentionally deceptive at worst. “No SDK Required” the slide says. “Sweet.” “You can start building your apps today.” “You can run your applications on Safari until the hardware is released.” “An awesome way to write apps for iPhone.” Bull.

Requiring apps to run on a remote server makes distribution simple, they claim. What it does is makes it so you can’t run third-party apps without a network connection. So you’d better be near a WiFi hotspot, or be ready to pay AT&T’s likely exhorbitant data rates (which haven’t been announced yet, as far as I’ve seen). And forget running anything useful while you’re stuck on a plane flight.

Having no access to the local data store gives excellent security, they claim. What it means is that your apps can’t access anything that would be useful to have on a mobile device, like your To-Do list, calendar, notes, tracks on your iPod, or photos. Unless you want to keep them on a remote server and only have access to them when you’re connected to the internet.

They’ve been struggling to figure out how to support outside development without compromising security or network integrity, they claim. Which is total bullshit; they’ve been struggling to figure out how to avoid giving up any of Apple’s opportunities to sell stuff through the iTunes Store, and AT&T’s opportunities to charge users for as much data access as possible.

All for a device that’s already six hundred dollars plus a two-year contract.

I always thought Apple and I had an agreement. I would keep giving them more and more of my money, and they would provide me with fancy stuff that worked well, and not lie about it. That keynote really hurt. Now I just have to see if I can survive my birthday at the end of the month, two days before the release of the iPhone. When they release a new gadget that every rational part of my brain finds repulsive and a ludicrous waste of money, while the rest of me is drawn like a Visa card-carrying moth to flame. Hopefully there’ll be a run on them, and it’ll be impossible to get one, or else I’m going to enter July feeling really, really stupid.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I lasted about a nanosecond before I broke down and bought a new computer (cat does not come standard). (Actually, cat does not come, period). It’s way more computer than I need — it’s way more computer than most shuttle launches need — and it was way too expensive, but somehow those facts don’t make it any less awesome. Just looking at it, I get a tingling in my extremity.

Keeping up the theme of needless excess, I bought a copy of Windows Vista to install on it. Mac OS X, Vista under Boot Camp, with a Parallels installation to get access without rebooting — it was going to be sheer operating system perfection. Remember that this was before I knew I was going to be working full time at a videogame company, back when I was actually going to have the time and desire to play videogames.

The thing about Vista is that it kinda sucks. I kept hearing how it was supposedly a rip-off of OS X, but I don’t really see it. It’s more like if Donald Trump got a hold of Windows XP. “We’re gonna make it very classy. Get a load of those transparent window borders and tell me that doesn’t make for the finest computing experience there is.”

Back when I was working on an Xbox game, the joke was that Microsoft kept demanding more flair: gameplay was secondary; what mattered was just cramming as many visual effects as you could into the game. It looks like Microsoft extended that same philosophy to their new OS. The fact that you can’t even tell which is the active window is irrelevant; it’s far more important that it looks like glass!

Normally I wouldn’t bitch about gratuitous visual effects; OS X basically pioneered that field (and I still spend minutes dropping widgets onto the dashboard just to see the ripple effect). But even when they’re not actually getting in the way of UI usability — like the active window thing — they’re really all that’s apparent to the user in the upgrade. It just feels like you’ve broken compatibility with most of your existing apps just for the sake of a billion new notification messages and windows that you can see through.

And they still can’t make a standards-compliant web browser. Seriously, how long is it going to take for them to just give up and go with every other browser available?

So it’s kind of garish and ugly, but mostly usable, so it shouldn’t matter all that much since I only use it for games and the occasional work-related task, right? Well, as it turns out, I completely missed the news that you need to buy the most expensive version of Vista in order to run it under virtualization software like Parallels. XP has no such limitation. And, Parallels doesn’t let you boot from your Vista boot camp partition, so if you want to have Boot Camp and Parallels, you have to do another install, which requires another Windows activation. Which I can’t do, because it violates the EULA.

Luckily, Microsoft is there for me: thanks to their innovative Windows BendOverAnywhere program, I can upgrade my copy of Vista to the ULTIMATE MEGAWEAPON version for the low, low price of $158. Which means the secondary just-for-games OS would end up adding over 200 bucks to the cost of the computer. But at least I’d be able to run it under Parallels… or would I? Paying that cost just gets you a download, because you’re only allowed to do it on one machine. And the Parallels VM counts as a separate machine. So installing it there gets me my virtualization-unfriendly version of Vista. Which won’t activate, because it thinks I’m trying to install it on a new computer. (Who knows what would happen if I needed to do a clean re-install of the OS. I’m guessing I’d need another $150 every time I wipe my hard drive?)

(Meanwhile, Parallels is sending me e-mails asking me to send them 40 bucks to upgrade to their newest version, which may or may not solve my problem. Does it let you run off the Boot Camp partition instead of requiring a separate install? No one will say definitively. You can try asking them for support… if you can find their secret forum that isn’t linked from their main page, only from Google searches. And no representatives are on hand there to answer questions. But at least I know that the new version can indeed run Quake 4, so that’s a relief.)

It’d be nice to ask somebody at Microsoft whether the software they’re charging me a couple hundred bucks for will actually run on my machine in the configuration I want. After going through ten pages on their customer support site, I finally get to a page that says it will let me e-mail somebody. As long as I enter my product key, and they determine that the key is valid for support; otherwise it’s $60 per “incident.” I enter the product key, out of pure optimism, and it takes me to a Microsoft SQL Server error page.

So as it stands now, I’m somewhat screwed. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop, so I can determine exactly how much money I’ve wasted. It’s either going to be the cost of Parallels and its upgrade, or the cost of Vista and its upgrade. Until then, it means rebooting the machine every time I want to play a game, at which point it hardly seems worth the effort. Maybe I’m supposed to be spending even more money on the Mac-native versions of these games? Or maybe finding a cheaper and more worthwhile hobby?

I should make it clear that I’m not enough of an Apple fanboy to say that they don’t suck. They do, but in a slightly different way. I’ve complained about the $125 they charge for every yearly OS upgrade, but at this point, all of that seems quaint. As Jon Gruber pointed out in an insightful post on his Daring Fireball blog, Apple is primarily a hardware company, not a software company. And as such, where they truly suck is in the hardware.

It’s all beautifully designed, of course, even the cheese grater. But there’s that deviously-planned obsolescence built right into every one, from the iPod batteries with the lifespans of mayflies, to the exploding laptop batteries, to the laptop latches.

Almost one month to the day after the warranty on my Mac laptop ran out, the latch broke (from what I read on the internet, it’s a very common problem, partly because the latch is ridiculously over-engineered). I put off getting it repaired until now, because I knew that phone support would be useless — the second you connect with a real human, they ask for your credit card number or try to sell you AppleCare. So I finally made an appointment to talk to a Genius. Forty-five minutes after my appointment time, said genius looked at my machine’s serial number, typed it into a database, and told me that it’d be $326 to get fixed. She referred me to a place across town that could probably do it for cheaper. When I got there, they said that they usually ship those repairs directly to Apple and that it’d cost me $426 including parts and labor.

And still, the Apple aura is so persuasive that I sit here typing on a ridiculously over-priced machine that could very well explode at any moment (or more likely, will explode exactly on April 19, 2008), and the only thing I can think of is bitching about Windows.

Update: Man, what’s the computer world coming to when a guy can’t make an over-long, whiny post bitching about cost and incompatiblities anymore? The day after I wrote this, Parallels released the new version of their software. Hidden among the new features is what I think is the most valuable one — being able to use your BootCamp Vista partition. Meaning no additional activation, no copying software over, just the ability to use your Vista stuff within OSX without rebooting. I’ve installed it with no problems, and so far it works mostly like I wanted. (Direct3D isn’t working for me at the moment, but it could very well just be a configuration thing I missed).

Having a piece of software work as advertised, and provide greater compatibility between rival operating systems with a minimum of hassle (if not a minimum of cost)? That sets a very bad precedent for the industry.

(WARNING: Yuppie-in-denial complaining follows. If you’re the type who’s offended by the petulant whining of the over-privileged, you’ll want to skip this post. And a couple of the next posts, too. For that matter, you probably want to skip this whole blog.)

These past few months have been kind of a test of will power for me. I’ve had this irrational jones to get a new computer, one that I haven’t been quite able to justify. I’ve got a behemoth of a Windows PC that I hardly ever use anymore, and it’s just taking up desk space. And because it’s one of those flashy black Alienware cases, it feels like it’s mocking me for not using it — it’s like having a pimped-out motorcycle in the garage that you don’t really need anymore because you actually just prefer driving the minivan.

So I want to get rid of it, and get a Mac desktop instead. Even though my laptop does everything I need, it makes me uncomfortable at an OCD-level using it as my one and only computer, for reasons that only years of therapy would be able to explain.

But I’ve been able to keep it under control, all this time. I figured I’d wait until it was time to get a new monitor, and upgrade everything at once. Then I found a deal on exactly the monitor I wanted, at almost $200 less than it normally sells for, so I picked one up.

Then I said I’d wait until Christmas-season unemployment situation worked out, and I started getting income again. Almost immediately, I got a check from a contracting job, which was almost exactly the cost of a new machine (after taxes).

Then I said I’d wait until Apple updated its desktop Mac line, to get in at the beginning of a product cycle instead of at the end, like I usually do. And literally the day after I said this, they announced their overkill model, which has way more processors than I’d need at a price there’s no way in hell I’d ever pay for a machine. So that was a wash.

Then I figured I’d wait until they released the new version of OS X, so at least I’d get that included in the price. It was coming out “in Spring,” most likely early June, so it was only a couple of months to wait and see if the feeling subsided. Tonight they announced that the next version of OS X has been delayed until October.

There’s no way I can hold out until October. I’m really tempted to just buy the damn thing now and be done with it. And reading the comments in response to that post on ars technica, a few other people are saying the same thing: “At least now I don’t have to wait to buy a new Mac.”

Now, that’s kind of creepy. The whole “Mac users are a cult” concept is tired and played out, but I’m kind of alarmed. They announce a delay in the release of their OS, and my first impulse was to punish them by giving them a lot of money for a new computer? And I’m not the only one! I really want to get a pair of those They Live glasses to see if my computer is projecting brainwashing images at me while I work and sleep.

And seriously: if anybody out there is still a Windows fan and would like a still-reasonably-capable (AMD Athlon 64 2.66 GHz, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum w/256MB VRAM) PC for a reasonable price ($800 or best offer), send me an e-mail at my name at this domain. Friends don’t let friends use ebay.

Back when I was writing columns for SFist, one of the things I kept harping on was that Apple should make a DVR. If they could do for television what they did for the iPod, that’d be huge, right? An interface for TV as slick as OS X, without as many of the weird limitations that the cable and sattelite companies build into their machines, and with the ability to use the video you record on your computer. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Of course, what they came out with instead was the Apple TV. I was completely unimpressed with the announcement, I was more blown away at the concept of Apple’s releasing a product that I didn’t want to buy. The Apple TV isn’t a DVR; it’s just a way to watch and listen to stuff from iTunes (and iPhoto) on a big screen TV. That’s it. I could barely see the point, and it seemed like a step backwards instead of an innovation.

Now that it’s been out for a while, I just read this review of the Apple TV on arstechnica.com. And I still would never even think of buying one of the things. But after seeing in detail how the thing works and which audience it’s targeted at, I think I finally understand it. And I’m more than a little disturbed.

I’m disturbed because of this: the reason I didn’t understand the thing is because I can’t conceive of a world without television.

It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s not like Apple has been subtle with their whole strategy — they want you to buy stuff off iTunes. But even though I’ve got several friends who don’t have cable or satellite, and I’ve got friends who even watch shows off iTunes and have told me about the process, I just couldn’t understand how the process would work. How can Chuck watch TV if Chuck no can hook satellite to computer? Chuck confused and angry!

Am I just too short-sighted and old to understand new media? Or have I been living for so long with a coaxial cable from Comcast or DirecTV that I see it as an umbilical cord, and can’t imagine life without it? I don’t even watch nearly as much TV as I used to, but still the thought of going without it altogether just never occurred to me. As a thought experiment, I decided to go through and find out what it would take to do the unthinkable, and live without a live TV feed coming into my home.

Microsoft has a new Video Marketplace you can access over the Xbox 360 (and I’m guessing Vista), but a) it doesn’t have a lot of TV content yet, and b) they don’t as far as I can tell let you download entire seasons. So until that matures, the only other option is iTunes.

And yes, I am aware that with the internet, you can get all the TV you want in high definition for free. But at present, the majority of my income comes from a major multinational media company, so I can’t really condone that with a clear conscience. And still, that stuff is hard to find, takes forever to download, and just has a “ethical gray area” feel to it. So I’m not considering that.

So for this test, I’ll take the shows that I watch regularly. I’ll pretend that their seasons all overlap, and that a season is about 9 months.

Now, I pay an obscene amount for my satellite TV connection. It’s almost as much as I pay for real necessities, like cigarettes. If I think about how much better it would be for me to take that money and donate it to charity or something, it just gets depressing and strikes me as vaguely un-American, so I’ll just leave that idea alone. What I will do, though, is cut ten bucks a month off the bill, because that’s what I pay for the HD package (which is mostly worthless, but the rare shows that are broadcast in HD are sweet), and iTunes doesn’t support HD yet.

So for DirecTV the total is: 9 months at $50 a month = $450 per season.
Downsides: Commercials, being stuck with DirecTV’s lousy DVR.

Looking on the iTunes store, here’s the cost of season passes of shows I’ve watched with any regularity in the past year:

1. 30 Rock: $34.99
2. Heroes: $42.99
3. Lost: $34.99
4. Monk: $29.99
5. Battlestar Galactica: $34.99
6. Doctor Who: not available
7. The Venture Brothers: $19.99
8. Mythbusters: $25.87
9. Passport to Europe: $22.99
10. Saturday Night Live: $29.99
11. The Sarah Silverman Program: $9.99
12. Kim Possible: $37.99
13. Legion of Super-Heroes: not available

So for iTunes the total is: $324.77 per season.
Downsides: waiting for downloads; the day delay between broadcast and iTunes availability; the lack of local programming, CNN and just lazy channel-surfing; knowing that I paid $43 for a show that I hate but am hooked on anyway (”Heroes”); no “Doctor Who;” no cheesy anime on adult swim. Plus, missing out on the stuff I watch sporadically but would never go out of my way to pay for — Discovery Channel documentaries, cheesy movies on the Sci Fi channel, and just about everything on the Food network.

I’d never seen a break-down like that before, and the result really surprised me. First, obviously, because it comes out cheaper to buy entire seasons online than it does to pay for a monthly satellite bill. Second, that there are shows available I never would’ve expected to be, like “Mythbusters” and “Passport to Europe.” And third, that browsing around the iTunes store works as well for TV shows as it does for music or watching stuff on a DVR. Especially since you can buy individual episodes to try them out. So I’ve gone from thinking that the iTunes video store was worthless, to realizing that unless you watch a lot more television than I do, it actually makes more sense to get stuff online than pay a regular monthly cable or satellite bill.

I’m not going to cut the cord anytime soon, since live and semi-live TV has gotten to be a habit. And there’s still a mental block with the pricing — even though it actually comes out cheaper, it’s easier for me to rationalize paying a bill and considering it a “utility”, than it would be to pay thirty or forty bucks for a series I feel somewhat guilty for watching anyway (like, for instance, the Disney Channel animated series aimed at teenage girls).

But after seeing it actually broken down, I feel like I finally understand why everybody’s making such a big fuss about TV over IP. If they can get semi-reformed TV junkies like me to make the switch, there’s a ton of potential and even more money to be made there; I wonder why they don’t make more of an effort to demonstrate how it’s cheaper.

And in case you’ve read all this, and your response is, “or you could, well, read a book,” then you just don’t get it, man.

Man, I want to get a 24″ iMac so bad I can taste it. The problem is I don’t, strictly speaking, need one.

I’m a master at convincing myself to blow too much money on excess stuff, and my skill only increases when Apple’s involved. But I’m hitting a brick wall here.

At the moment, I’ve got a PC that’s a little over two years old, and a MacBook Pro that I got last spring. I use the laptop for about 99.9% of everything. The PC is now my ghetto machine, for work stuff that only runs in Windows, for games (and it’s already showing its age on that front), and for “private web browsing” of stuff I don’t want anybody to know I look at and don’t want in my main machine’s browser history (like this).

So really, it all comes down to the fact that I want a bigger monitor (somewhat valid), and it bugs me that I’m using a laptop as my desktop computer (totally irrational). And, I guess, I want to get more room on my desk. I could ditch the PC, and the only thing I’d be missing out on — apart from the wad of cash I spent on it a couple of years ago — is the ability to play a videogame full-screen while checking my e-mail. I suspect I’d find some way to manage.

Part of me says that as long as I’m jonesing for a computer, I should be all excited about the Mac Pro. It’d be better at running both OS X and Windows stuff (if you believe some people, it runs Vista better than it does OS X), and it’d be more expandable. Which is to say, expandable at all.

Every instinct I have says it’s a bad idea to buy a machine on which you can’t swap out video cards and hard drives, but then I’ve got to look back at my track record and the mass-market, preconfigured computer industry as a whole. These things just ain’t as upgradeable as they used to be. Apple’s most guilty of it, granted, but across the board, it seems like the planned obsolescence lifespan of computers and electronics has shrunk to just over two years.

But, much like James Bond and my car, they just won’t die, is the problem. They linger. They stay just functional enough that they’re perfectly adequate for most of what you want to do, but constantly give you reminders that they’re old. That top-of-the-line videocard you shelled out for now wheezes when it tries to display a Flash movie. That monitor that seemed more than big enough a couple of years ago, now seems cramped and confining. That 1GB of memory that at the time was so excessive you started to reminisce about how your first computer didn’t even have a quarter of that in hard drive space, now is just a minimum requirement. And sure, you could upgrade, but it’s like putting bionic parts on your high school sweetheart, when you really want to run off with the new secretary/trophy wife.

Which all leads me to realize that this thing that Apple marketing and product design does, is more insidious than I ever even suspected. There’s just something about the iMac that works on the nerve endings at the base of my spine, even though it’s irrational. Sure the Mac Pro is an overall more powerful computer, but then I’d have to buy a new monitor! (Yeah, I know that logic makes no sense, but I already said it was irrational). The iMac is a whole, complete package, like the perfect answer to a question. And that question is, “What can I waste a ton of money on this year?”

I should be safe for a few months, anyway. The rationalization that’s still firmly in place is that I only buy a new computer when the new version of the OS is available. See, that way I save over $100, instead of having to buy the OS separately. (That’s how you stick it to The Man, by spending a couple thousand bucks every OS upgrade!)

Still, don’t be surprised if around spring, you see me trying to sell a PC and a couple of flat panel monitors. (Note: readers of this blog, as always get, deep discounts).