After quite some research and coping with the seemingly antagonistic contradiction between desire and financial capabilities I decided to migrate to Mac. My final choice was the simpler Mac Mini which was sold by a local Premium Reseller with 2G RAM as a promotion and I asked for a 320G (7200RPM) HD replacing the original 120G one.

I actually migrated from two directions:

• I used to be using a pretty old laptop with Ubuntu Linux on it for emailing, surfing the Web, writing blog posts and some basic Web developments,
• and was suffering on an even older desktop PC with Windows on it for photo editing.

I don’t want to be laughed at so I’d rather not list the specs of my old stuff here. It’s enough to say that both were slow, watching videos was rather like looking at slide-shows of still images, the desktop PC was laud, and when I write laud, I mean laud, and  the display of the laptop started to be unreadable after I managed to screw up the video driver when upgraded the operating system to 9.04. (Supposedly it was not entirely my fault. ) So, it was high time to change.

Mac is smooth. It’s a pleasure to use. Certainly the official keyboard that I also purchased contributes a lot, but it is all about simplicity and user-friendliness. I know it’s not a surprise to Mac users but it was for me: despite the beginners unfamiliarity with the system this operating system is clear and easy to learn at least to the basics. There are not many tools available for the same tasks and deep level configuration possibilities are hidden from the average user. (Even though I had to deep dive once, refreshing my command line memories, when some difficulties occurred with unmounting my external USB HD.) Apparently Ubuntu is trying to achieve something similar in terms of simplicity and even with the look and feel, but I can see nothing wrong with that.

Mac Mini is mini indeed. However, it is powerful enough, at least for the time being. An I know this an other road – after photography – where there is no way to stop. We are all running on it, and we seems to be happy with it.