It’s official, new MacBooks will be announced next week. I’ve been waiting for these quite a while. My 5-year-old PowerBook G4 has been steadily dying over the past few months. This Sunday — or was it Saturday? — I knew she was finally done.

It must have been Saturday because I had followed a link to a temporary YouTube video from SNL mocking the recent vice presidential debate. Flash has almost always been a difficult thing for my PowerBook to handle, more so in recent versions. YouTube usually does pretty well, many other Flash video sites do not. This time the playback stuttered and limped along. I could sense a general wheezing slowness to every part of the OS. Tinúviel had a failed hard drive.

Backups with SuperDuper! failed repeatedly. No matter what I did I continued to have I/O errors at some level. I gave up on a full backup and concentrated on the Users folder. After deleting several files I had success, and I shut down both the PowerBook and external hard drive with a sigh of relief.

It was time, without a doubt, to say goodbye.

Rumors had been swelling for what seemed like months about new MacBooks. I had heard that October 14th was the date we’d see a refresh. I had a rough couple of days checking rumor sites for any news. Surely, if these new notebooks were to be as drastic a revision as we expected Apple would want to do a big event. But I despaired as each day passed without an invitation. I couldn’t risk buying a new MacBook if new ones were so close, but what if they weren’t? I’m just not capable of living without my own computer.

So, now they’re definitely coming. I’m ordering one as soon as the Apple Store comes back online.

This PowerBook is my first Mac. With my most recent bout of schooling drawing to a close it was time I thought about getting a real job. I would need to create a résumé. I would need to email said résumé to prospective employers. My father thought I might need a notebook.

At the time — 2003 — my computer was a somewhat elderly PC cobbled together from parts I had been hanging onto in some cases for years. It had something in the neighborhood of 15 to 20GB of hard drive space on two different hard drives purchased years apart. I had built the whole damned thing from scratch. Finding a heat sink to fit the oddball motherboard I had purchased took at least 4 tries.

I don’t know what I had decided on a Mac. Not long ago I had railed loudly against the platform to my housemates. I was doing a bit of web design at the time, struggling with CSS. Safari hadn’t yet made any inroads. Firefox was still in its infancy. Neither one existed at all at the time of my ranting (2002). We had Internet Explorer and Netscape. Maybe Opera, but I never touched it. As most of the web designers used Macs, most of the ones who talked the loudest online, I heard a lot about IE5. That it was so much better than anything on PC, and that any problems I was having couldn’t possibly be blamed on it. Maybe I’m exaggerating but one fact is abundantly clear: Coding CSS was a lot harder then than it is now.

So when my father announced over Thanksgiving break that he was going to buy a notebook for me we looked at some Dells and some HPs, but that wasn’t what I really wanted. I must have indicated as much because he asked what I really wanted and I pulled up the iBook page. I distinctly remember him asking if that was what I really wanted because I remember saying “Well, no, what I really want is…” and then pulling up the PowerBook. There was a much bigger difference between the PowerBook G4 and iBook G4 than there is between the MacBook Pro and MacBook, at least there seems to be where I’m sitting.

So, we ordered the PowerBook. It arrived a few days later and I was struck, immediately, at just how goddamned right it was. I’d been using a computer since our first 386 — or was it a 486? — many years ago. I thought I knew how these things worked.

I was wrong. They could be so much better.

Everything was where it was supposed to be. I was used to hunting for things. For just knowing things. I was used to autoexec.bat and config.sys. I was used to the registry. These were the things you grimly accepted on your way to being able to use a computer. But it didn’t have to be.

I can’t remember any sort of learning curve. If anything, there was an un-learning curve. Remarking on the process of switching I’ve often said that it would probably be easier to pick the Mac OS if you had never touched a computer before in your life. It just worked the way you’d expect it to.

In my years of using a computer these past 5 have been the best. I wish I’d gotten here sooner, but that’s ignoring a pretty substantial dark period of Mac history I took no part in. The important thing is I got here.

And, on Tuesday, I get to make another important step: I get to order my second Mac.