Here's my bloody iBook!

Last updated: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 12:01:00 GMT

It's been in my sweaty paws for all of 36 hours.

I can't decide whether I'm really, really impressed, or whether I'm allowing myself to be swayed by the fact that I've actually spent my own hard-earned on this thing and, in actual fact, I am merely really impressed.

This thing rocks. Really rocks. I've no doubt that I'll find things that it does badly, or that it doesn't do at all, but I've got to say that so far, the closest it gets is "well, that's pretty cool, but it could be ever so slightly cooler."

The most telling moment was yesterday, when I had it sitting on my desk next to my Toshiba, which was running a fresh-blown install of Windows XP. I've used XP in the past only because, well, despite the fact that I'm a UNIX perv at heart, I sometimes just want stuff to look nice and work straight out of the tin, which hasn't been my experience of any UNIX-like OS on laptop hardware over the past two years -- and believe me, I've done a lot of OS-hopping in the past 24 months.

So, the Tosh is sitting on top of my overflowing In tray and I'm tinkering with the iBook on the desk in front of me, and the Tosh catches my eye. I turn slowly and take in the XP desktop and the words just come tumbling out of my mouth.

"Looks like someone brought their ugly retarded cousin to the barn dance."

That's all I could say, because I couldn't stop laughing.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, the Mac looked quiet, understated and clean, while the XP box looked like a toddler had vomited a 32-pack of Crayola over a 15" screen.

But it's not all looks.

More later, with added Perspectiv-Os.