Yes, people, I am succumbing to the allure of a certain fruit-emblazoned technology, or at least will be soon.

When I was in elementary school I remember going to ARC (aka College for Kids) one day a week and learning how to move the ‘turtle’ around by writing Basic commands on an Apple IIc. When I was in high school I had to do a History Fair project on column styles (architecturally speaking) and typed up my display board captions and bibliography on the cute rectangular Mac at my Mom’s office, the one with the little screen.

When I graduated high school and came to work at that same place of business, it was the cute 90s-style Mac that I worked on. Then it was a g3, then not to long ago a g4. Meanwhile, I had purchased a computer for home, a Compaq if I remember correctly, because PCs were so much more inexpensive and you could actually afford the software. Only super rich people, graphic artists, and businesses used Apples, or so it seemed at the time.

Now my office is going through a metamorphoses as many of the Macs are being replaced by Dell PCs. This includes my machine, and for over six months I’ve had two computers in front of me, one of each, and have known that my Mac’s days were numbered.

It’s a shame, too, having finally been able to upgrade to OS X and seeing on the shiny fun things X can do. I love Safari and the fact that Mail is virtually untouchable by viruses. How nice not to worry about those pesky things. I like the interfaces, I adore iTunes (though I do have it downloaded on my PCs as well) and will greatly miss using my Mac regularly as we transition fully to the new system. I even like the keyboard better.

Of course, the cute advertisements and iEverything also make the lure of the albino fruit all the more enticing. And the old arguments: too expensive, software non-existant or prohibitively expensive, etc. are all falling away in the wake of the new technologies. Even my ex’s mantra “Can’t compute with fruit” no longer holds true as those lovely Macs can run Windows too, though even I’m having a tough time figuring out why I’d really need to with Mac’s own software and the open-source programs available.

All this to say, the lure of the mac mini is becoming more than I can bear. Nor do I implore my friends to lash me to the mast in order to resist the siren song for my mind is made up, but I have my own Scylla and Charybdis to tackle first.

I have put before myself two obstacles to overcome before letting my fingers click that precious ‘add to cart’ button:

Scylla is the many-headed monster that is the software transition at work. Recently it was decided that the running of the parallel systems will end after July. Once our ‘working’ August begins (always a little after the calendar one starts, just the nature of the business) I will no longer be doing everything twice. How nice. So that’s step one, and a rather fitting step since this change will be what terminates my daily work use of the mac.

Charybdis is the swirling vortex that I fittingly have called for some time The Abyss–my craftroom, office, studio… the second bedroom of my apartment that is more a retaining pond for my creative supplies and anything else that doesn’t belong in the ‘front’ of the house that people see than actually the functional space it was meant to be. It is into this room that the mac mini will go and therefore it is only fitting to place it there after running iOrganize on the space. I had started to tackle this project a few months ago, then life happened and progress stopped. The craft supply forest has made a move to reclaim its territory and now the path I’d carefully carved out has its edges blurred as tendrils of fabric snake out and replant themselves.

So that’s it. I get those two things accomplished while keeping the rest of my life at its normal clip and then I will gleefully reward myself with a super cute mac mini with the larger harddrive and DVD burner, etc. The hp desktop that currently resides in that space will go to the Shady Acres Rest Home (aka my mom’s place) where it will live out its years playing Solitaire, Freecell, and Textwist and reading the news.