Too Much Is Not Enough

Khoi

20 years ago

Macintoshes in my apartment, right now: A 12-in. PowerBook G4, which is my principal machine, on which I do nearly all of my work. A 15-in. Titanium PowerBook G4, which I retired a year ago, but which I still use for miscellaneous tasks and as an impromptu file server. A Power Macintosh G4, aging but still remarkably serviceable and running Mac OS X Panther quite nicely — this is my girlfriend’s workhorse, but it too will soon retire as she makes plans to buy herself a PowerBook G4. And finally, tucked away someplace where my girlfriend can’t complain about it, an ancient PowerBook 3400c/180, a relic of the nineties with a busted motherboard that I’m toying with getting repaired just for the heck of it.

That should be enough Macs for one little East Village apartment, right? Apparently not, as I’ve been entertaining the idea of adding a Power Macintosh G5 to the mix, to remedy the increasingly slow performance of my 12-in. PowerBook G4. It would be great to have a desktop machine again, after so long working on laptops exclusively — I’m daydreaming about all those slots and fast ports.

And I still haven’t completely given up on the idea of a Mac mini as a server of some kind, though I’m less enthusiastic about this model now after realizing that the hard drive is so slow and the case so difficult to open. Still, I could put it to good use, just as I could put any Mac you throw my way to some kind of good use. I’ll never have enough of these machines.