The forbidden fruit

When I bought my Compaq Presario almost 5 years ago, I was thrilled.  My parent's current computer was a 3-year-old Gateway.  It was a Pentium 200 with 96 Megs of RAM and a 4 Gigabyte Hard Drive.  My new Presario was equipped with an Athlon XP 1700+ processor running at just over 1.4 Gigahertz, 512 megs of SDRAM, an 80 gigabyte hard drive, and four USB ports.  I've sinced added 2 USB ports and a GeForce FX 5200 video card for games.  The point is, this was a HUGE technological leap from the previous generation of PC's.  My new machine was 7 times faster, had 5 times the memory and 20 times the hard drive space.  It also came with a CD burner and DVD-ROM drive, an ideal setup for the time in my opinion.

I've put this machine through hell, too.  I've installed every Linux distribution on it that I could get my hands on: Red Hat and it's descendent Fedora Core, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, and some other obscure distibutions.  I've had it dual-booting operating systems for longer periods than it had a single OS.  The hard drive has been re-formatted so many times it's having an identity crisis.

This has led me to finally think about retiring the old beast and replacing it with something new.  Being a fan of UNIX-based operating systems and stability, I have begun seriously looking at Apple to be my next electronic appendage.  Apple uses high-quality parts and features an operating system that is not only stable, but just plain usable and lickably-pretty to boot.  The iLife software bundled with every machine is very appealing as well.  My fingers itch with anticipation just thinking about laying down some tracks with GarageBand or mastering a new film with iDVD.  There is only one hurdle that is blocking me from taking the plunge:  the specs.

Those horrible, horrible numbers haunt me every time I visit my local Apple store.  I'm looking at spending over $1000 to go from 1.46 GHz to 2.0GHz, 512 MB of RAM to 512 MB of RAM, 80 GB of hard drive space to 80 GB of hard drive space, and a DVD reader to a DVD burner.  It just doesn't seem that 540 MHz and DVD burning capabilities are worth a grand of my hard-earned cash.

Now, before you throw me on the racks because I've fallen for "the megahertz myth," let me explain something.  I realize that numbers can be deceiving when it comes to computer performance.  I know that an 800 MHz G4 will perform almost on par with my Athlon 1700.  I know that there is a vast difference between 512 megabytes of PC100 SDRAM and 512 megabytes of PC4000 DDR2 RAM.  I also realize that if I had a DVD burner, I would likely have my digital camcorder surgically grafted to my face, much to the annoyance of my friends who also star in more films than they would like.

But those numbers, they lounge on those information cards, screaming out to me "you could get a PC with double these for $200 less!"  I understand more than ever that buying is Apple is indeed "taking a plunge."  If I do buy an Apple, it will be me throwing away almost all notions of PC performance out the window.  I will be discarding Intel's simple lesson of "more megahertz=faster=better."  In a world of ever-diversifying products, I figure I'll have to learn that lesson sooner or later anyway.