Relentless Inquiry

Wow, the new MacBook Pro looks terrible. I may need to switch to a Linux laptop next time I upgrade. I hate hate hate the big trackpad on my current MacBook pro and had to turn off all the stupid gestural stuff to keep the machine from doing lame things all the time. And no USB ports, just Thunderbolt? How stupid is that?

I've been a premium Mac laptop buyer since the original Powerbook came out in 199x but this is just the suck. I don't need a new laptop anytime soon anyway though, mine is only 2 or 3 years old. Maybe they'll "think different" about the new lossage for the next rev.

This is kind of a welcome wake-up call, really. While I love the Mac, the OS is getting increasingly annoying, the UI makeovers just frustrating, and frankly I use almost no commercial software running on the Mac itself– I have MS Office for former-work stuff, ditto OmniGraffle and VMWare. I don't do sophisticated photo editing, so I don't have the Adobe tools. Ah. But wait. I know what's keeping me hostage– iTunes. There's 15 years of incompatible format non-exportable music and playlists that can't run on Linux. Thousands of dollars worth of music that there's no easy way to export, catalog, and replace. Crap. Have been buying music off Amazon lately, but it's a tiny sliver of my collection.

What to do, what to do. Nothing for the moment, but this needs thinking on for sure. I don't use iPhones or iPads, I have Android devices, so the whole Apple ecosystem is pretty useless to me other than the music.