HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?

As a sidenote, this is the year that finally saw me as an iPod convert. I don't know what to tell you. Apple's iPod is THE product of choice for a reason.

There's no question the Intel Mac has been a runaway success for Apple, but it hasn't all been bread and roses, with reports of serious heat issues plaguing virtually every MacBook line. The old adage sticks: never buy version 1.0 hardware from Apple.

Of course, I had a friend in college that liked her shiny new MacBook because "it keeps me warm in the winter." So there you go. If you live someplace cold (my mother just moved to North Dakota and said they were having a heatwave; when I asked her what the temperature was, she said "23 degrees"), consider their thermal issues a "feature."

That said, the new MacBooks are downright FIERCE, powerful machines, and Apple scored a strong coup with users by allowing dual booting of Windows on their MacBooks. And also - and this seems small potatoes - but am I the only one that really likes the new keyboards on the MacBooks? Not the Pros, the regular ones. As far as I'm concerned, they're the most comfortable notebook keyboards I've ever used.

What really impressed me, though, was that Apple made the transition from 64-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit remarkably gracefully (G4 to Core Duo to Core 2 Duo); invisibly, actually. I wish Microsoft could figure that out.

Unfortunately, I wasn't as quick to make the transition as I thought I'd be, and the reasons are fairly simple and stupid: keyboard layout is missing needed PC keys, and the mouse is still only one frigging button. Come on Apple. You got with the program on the desktop when you started shipping Mighty Mouse, let's get a second mouse button all up in this beezy.