I’m 90% sure that when it’s time to buy my next desktop computer, I’m going to buy another Apple. I don’t know if all models are this way, but my PowerMac (which I bought used nearly a year ago) is just so awesome. The design of the hardware itself is better than any other computer I think I’ve used, and that’s a lot of them over the past 19 years!
Case in point: I ordered an additional hard drive from an internet store, because my system drive is running out of room and I wanted a fast drive for video and audio projects. I got a good deal on a 500 gig SATA 7200 RPM drive from Newegg.com. The drive arrived over a week ago, but I just now had time to try to install it.
First off, you don’t have to screw in the drive to the chassis, like just about every PC I’ve owned. You just screw these little plastic tabs into the mounting holes on the drive and then it slides wonderfully into the 2nd drive bay. A little plastic flap comes down to keep the thing from sliding around. Then I got to wondering what I was going to do about power and the SATA connection. The drive I bought was just the barebones drive and didn’t include any cables. I was dreading digging through my pile of unsorted computer parts to try to find the right cables, which is what I’d do if I were adding a new drive to one of my PCs. But then I realized that the PowerMac designers provided me with cables already plugged in, and sitting in exactly the place where they should be. So all I had to do was give a little tug to the connectors and plug them right in. It was such a nice experience!
Now, I suppose that there are PC chassis that are this well designed, and maybe I just never have owned one. But my PowerMac is the easiest system to upgrade of any computer I’ve ever used. I hope the new MacPro systems are this easy, because that’ll probably be my next system, sometime in early 2008.