Switch

This title was meant to have a double meaning. One was snowboarding opposite to how you normally board (which I managed to accomplish). The other was referring to the Apple campaign of Windows users switching to Macs. I'll forget about the former and elaborate on the latter.

I'm trying to alleviate the problem of having only one computer at home. Paul's laptop is getting some heavy use and a second computer would really help our situation. I'm sure Paul wants to use his laptop whenever he feels like it and not have to worry if I'm borrowing it or not. Also a second computer would allow us to play WoW at the same time, double the fun! There are two dilemmas I face here; the first is whether to get a laptop or a desktop computer. A laptop would be more convenient as we don't have any appropriate places to set up a desktop, but it would also be more expensive. The second dilemma is whether to buy a Mac or not. Initially I thought that I'd like to get an Alienware laptop since they have a main office in the UK. It'd be expensive but I wouldn't have to pay for shipping to Australia, then I'd have an Alienware computer and all the chic factor goes with it. But the problem of how to pay for it creeps in, I haven't got enough savings to pay for it so I need some form of financing. Alienware US offer financing, but not here in the UK. Most banks won't give me a personal loan since I haven't lived in the country for the mandatory 3 years. It would have been great to get it under a salary sacrifice scheme, but it seems they're not as nice here as in Australia. Here, you can salary sacrifice on a personal arrangement with your employer. But to be tax effective it must be approved by Inland Revenue, otherwise you'll pay full tax anyway. Purchasing a laptop is not approved by Inland Revenue, they consider it basically a cash reward. I guess people could quickly sell the laptop, brand new and in packaging for not much less than purchase price and get a large sum in tax free pounds. Instead they have a scheme which seems similar to what was possible in Australia, the Home Computing Initiative. This allows employers to lease computers (not just laptops) to employees in a way that will be tax effective. The cost of the lease can be salary sacrificed and up to £500 per year of that will be tax effective. Like novated leasing a car, you can purchase the computer at the end of the leasing period for an agreed market value. This means that if you want a £1500 laptop (the most common price example), you must be in the lease agreement for 3 years to gain full benefits. There are also several other implications that make it seemed rather flawed to me, but it's the best thing available here. Ideaworks do not offer a scheme like this currently, and even though some people here are interested in getting one started I don't think it fits my requirements anymore. Unfortunately, this means that I can't get the almost 50% savings from salary sacrificing a computer purchase and I'll need to cough up the dough up front somehow.

This is where the idea of a Mac came in. Although I haven't verified that it's possible for me to get, Apple do offer financing for Mac purchases. But do I want a Mac? The Powerbooks do look nice, and they're not much different in price from an Alienware laptop (the Area-51m 7700 does look really nice, PCI-X, nVidia GeForce 6800, RAID, 17" screen ... the list goes on) but I wasn't sure about it's performance with games, particularly World of Warcraft. A novel solution presented itself, just try it on a Powerbook! The Apple store on Regent Street has a large foyer filled with Powerbooks, G5s, iBooks, iMacs and all manor of other Apple products. They're available for anyone to use, most people will just come in for the free internet access. The most ridiculous thing I saw was one person using the Dual G5 Mac with twin 30" Cinema Displays reading a webpage full screened where the content was a liquid fixed width column in the middle, much like this page. Just imagine 12" of unused space on either side of this text and another 30" screen totally unused and you'll get the idea. So I dragged Paul along to the Apple store, waited for a Powerbook to be free and proceeded to install WoW. After nearly 2 hours of standing (no chairs, probably to stop people from staying too long, hah!) it was finally installed and I could have a look. It looked quite nice, but paled in comparison to Paul's laptop. Even with the slightly better video card and presumably a better processor, frame rates were quite low and visual effects needed to be turned off. I'm unsure if the latest OS patches and drivers were installed and I know that there were great improvements in Mac WoW performance with these applied, but I wasn't blown away with how it performed. Since I'd be playing this a fair bit, it didn't help me make the switch away from the world of 3 button mice and into the world where modifier keys abound and the menu bars are always at the top of the screen. I did also want to dabble in programming at home (maybe even working from home) and I wasn't sure if there would be any problems in that regards. It's a tough decision, but the clincher would probably be getting finance. If Apple give me that, I'll probably get a Powerbook. You never know, I might just like it.