Of course, after speaking of the coolness of the new Mac Mini, I ordered one from Amazon - $595, no sales tax, $3.99 next day shipping. Just this morning, I sold my current Mac Mini on eBay for $644.98. I did upgrade the RAM to 8GB at one point which cost me about $100 so the total cost of my old Mac Mini was about $745. The price difference of about $100 could be viewed as a "lease" for the use of the old Mac Mini for about 13 months worth of use or about $8 a month. Not too shabby and I get the latest hardware for another XX months (I'm guessing about a year). I've been playing this game for about 2-3 years now with my Macs (Mini and laptops) and it's a very acceptable way to upgrade your machines at a very nominal cost. I think the one year churn is perfect since your outgoing hardware still has great value. As I've stated before, Macs hold their value pretty well compared to PCs. Add in the fact that Mac productivity software is cheaper than PCs ($79 versus $279) and you don't have to buy anti-virus software (yet), the value of buying that Dell laptop doesn't really look that great.

I just setup my mom with a new PC. Ironically it was an old Mac Mini laying around the office. However, I wasn't going to go through the machinations of teaching her Mac OS so I just ran Bootcamp to boot into Windows XP.

So I was accused the other day of being a Mac snob which is odd given that I only started using them a couple of years ago (not counting my Apple IIe days). The first Mac I bought at that time was a Macbook Air. I had been using a 15.4" Dell Inspiron which was pretty heavy and also on its last legs so I thought it was a good opportunity to try a super-light computer. Also, I had been using the iPhone for about 6 months and wanted to see how pairing a Mac with an iPhone would be. The experience was good so my next machine was an aluminum Macbook (the one that was stolen). During that time, I wouldn't have been against going back to PC laptops but there weren't any compelling reason to do so. When I switched from the Inspiron to the Air, it was because I wanted the lighest laptop available at the time. Is there a PC laptop that could make me want to switch back? I guess I did my version of the Laptop Hunters commercial...