After Apple

I went to the opening of the new store at The Domain in Austin recently. It’s the second one in Austin and the second opening I went to. Although, curiously, I had more access to the store as a non-employee than I did as an employee, which is kind of odd.

Which is to say that I was able to get in to the soft opening as a guest as well as arriving early enough to be one of the first to enter on the real opening day. It’s kind of worth it, this place is huge. The word going around the employees is that this is Apple’s largest 45’ store that’s not a flagship store, and when you see inside you realize how entirely plausible that is. It’s huge.

Here’s the opening video and a Flickr photoset of the better photos of the opening.

Well, I've been pondering it for a while and a few weeks ago I finally gave notice. It's hard to leave, but there are better things for me out there.

I've been given the option of finishing out the week until Friday or just taking off since I've handed off all of my work. Is one week's pay worth it when there's something else waiting?

Well, when I do go, I have a very long entry I've been working on to post to this site, so watch for that in the next week.

I’m leaving my current job and starting a new one here soon. As a part of the job I’ve been issued (yes, a bit early) a MacBook Pro for home/office use. Actually, there’s a way to buy it off the company and I think I’ll be looking at that.

What gets me is that I’ve been using an iBook since about early 2003. The original was replaced with an iBook G4 at one point, but it’s really just the same little machine with some additional horsepower. The iBook is a weak and tired little machine in comparison. Up until now I’ve been happily complacent with the 12” screen and the “fast enough” processor and graphics card. Most everything I needed to do, I could do on that little machine. In fact, I’m quite proud to say I managed to live in 30GB of drive space for many years without exploding too much over the rim (I offloaded data to a home server now and again, and deleted the other things like download archives or whatnot).

Then I get this monster. I’ve never owned a PowerBook of any kind, so stepping from the iBook to the MacBook Pro is quite the leap. The first little shock is the size of the 15” itself. It’s huge. I mean, it’s huge to me because I’m used to the 12” screen, but it’s more than large enough to really do some crazy things.