Oh noes we gots features!

Mr. Scalzi has purchased some sweet sweet tech. Of course, the comment thread brings up the mac/pc and buy vs. rent music, and I think something about Steve Job's nipples . . . . yeah, it goes there.

But can't we all just get along?

Thing is, I agree with Mr. Scalzi about the subscription music service and the cool flexibility of his new device. That said, I don't mind being the Apple eco system. Its not because of stupidity, but because the relative worth of certain features are more valuable to you than others.

I've seen lots of mp3 players that have more features than an ipod. But. They were nightmares to load. Or took some serious geekitude to get it to work.

And I'm no stranger to serious geekitude. If you used to play computer games in the dos/windows 3.1 era, you know what I mean. Remember when games never worked? Seriously, you knew that going into the drive was something that was going to crash your computer most likely. I had my interrupts memorized. I knew how to access all the dipass memory setting each game required. Oh yes, my pretties, each game would access memory differently than the others and you might have to set the memory yourself. "Day of the Tentacle" was an awesome game, just a pain to get going the first time. Or maybe your chip wouldn't let the game play. I could never get XCOM to work on my Cyrus PC.

(Funny aside, but I hate George Lucas for the Star Wars desecration, but shoot almighty, if Lucasarts didn't put out some fiiiiiiine games. )

I even wrote a front end script which made a load screen so I could save myself some time when I wanted to play Flight Simulator rather than Doom. So yeah, I can knuckle around some tech.

That said, I've also tried to use just about every sub $99 digital video editor and they were all teh suck. Okay, here is where you don't get to say "Well, if you'd have used Vegas Video . . . " Yeah, and if wishes were fishes, the homeless would smell like a tuna cannery . . . .

As I got along in life and started having less time than work and money, dickin' around on the computer didn't hold as much appeal as it did at one time. It's just a fact of life. You can afford Carling Black Label and Ramen when you get out of college . . . . but how come you don't eat it? (Of course, I'm just beggin' the gods of contrariness to send me someone who claims that's all they've ever eaten ever!)

In any event, the Apple I've got (mac mini, the headless beast!) has never so much as hiccuped when I did a little vid production. I can email, play the music, blah blah. Its great. Furthermore, the graphics on the console games are so close or better than some PC games, there's not the compelling reason to have a PC that I once had. Though I would dearly love to see some of the Baldur's Gate type games on XBox . . . (Yeah, macs play games. Sort of.) Another pointless aside, but am I the only person who thinks that the optical mouse was a step back from the rollerball mouse on FPSs like Doom? I could do this cool wrist flip and be going 180 degrees where the optical mouse just made me turn slow enough to get fragged . . .

But, I agree, that's one badass piece of Kit Scalzi's hooked himself up with.