My First Mac User Group Meeting and the iMac in All Its Whiteness With All the White
Last night, David took me to the monthly CapMac meeting with an iBook in tow and some burrito in our bellies. Their meetings are held in the new Pharmacy Building on the UT campus, so we had the time of our lives parking at UT while school is in! There are so many students at UT — I couldn’t believe it. Baylor is like 1/100th of UT, only Baylor is in its own red-brick, perfectly manicured, no driving through campus, wide open spaces world. UT is like downtown… with streets! You can drive through campus! Drive! With a car! And park, if you’re lucky. We did not have a permit of any kind so we resorted to a parking garage a few blocks away. Not the garage mahal, which we would have if we were back at Baylor, but a regular, plain, concrete parking garage. I think Baylor is the only school to erect a garage rediculously fancy enough to be dubbed “garage mahal” or the “taj magarage” as I have heard some people call it.
The walk over to the Pharmacy building was downhill from the garage. It was a nice evening stroll following an older man wearing a Mac shirt talking with two older women to the crosswalk where we were joined by two others. David pointed out that all the conversations were about Macs… namely the new iMac and Tiger. My man loves his macs. He especially loves hearing others loving macs! and in public! It was enough to put a smile on his face for the rest of the walk.
The room where the meeting was held was like no classroom I had ever been in before. The seats were auditorium-style with desks that spanned the width of the rows of seats and every two seats had an electrical outlet and two ethernet jacks. This in itself is not extraordinary… but the fact that I had never been in a classroom like that before is extraordinary. I mean, I’m a teacher. I’ve been in lots of classrooms! We both agreed that we would not get much work done if we were students these days with a laptop in that classroom.
The meeting proceeded as any meeting would proceed. There were two iPod minis given away as well as JBL Creature Speakers II and an iTalk by Griffin. Dave won none. The presenter, Meredith Tucker, was from Intego software and presented her company’s software for macs in a very professional manner. All their programs will be worth the investment when David and I have children that will be database administrators at the age of two! Ha! I can only pray that our future children will be so smart.
At the end of the meeting, one of the CapMac Members who works for Apple walked down to the front of the classroom with a very large bag… and out came a brand-new 17 inch white iMac. oh, the iMac. Yes, the new one with all the white. I must say that in my original impression, from the pictures online, the latest iMac design simply looks like a very white iBook-type laptop-on-a-base kind of computer. Not so. This thing has mass. And it is very white. In person, it is easy to see how far off I was in my first impression about the laptopness of it, but the whiteness cannot be mistaken. The thing is thick… it is very large, and it is heavy, and did I mention that it is very very white? The white iMac in all its white glory was there in the room with us and I think David began to drool. Anyhow, I sent him down to meet the white shining heavy large iMac with a camera and he got some good pictures.
I don’t know why the woman on the far left looks so disgusted, but I love the picture. Overall, I had a great time and really enjoyed seeing Dave be surrounded by people who love Apple as much as he loves Apple. CapMac is the place for Dave and I’m glad I was there to see the new iMac in person.