I’ve always been something of an anti-Apple bigot. It started in the early days, when as a TRS-80 CoCo owner, I had a healthy dislike for Commodore-64s and the odious Apple II. When the first Mac came out, I remember thinking, “How can anyone do anything without a command line to type in?” Yeah, one of those. Over the years, I lost some of the hard edge to my dislike of Apple, partly because I always thought Steve Jobs had a lot of style, and partly because they gradually eased over the line marginally onto “my” side in my eternal, bottomless pit of white-hot loathing for the Evil Beast of Redmond, Micro$oft. But I still wouldn’t have considered actually owning an Apple thingy. Heavens, no.

This has all changed somehow. Early this year, I finally bought an iMac for my wife: she liked the cool, translucent white, the near-total lack of cords, the nice keyboard, etc. I chuckled, being the geek that I am, and how someone might get attached to all those silly aesthetic things about what is, after all, a computer, not a decoration.

By the time I had hers out of the box, installed and running, I wanted one for me. I wanted two, actually. We now have 3 (an iBook and a Mac Mini). The Mini is mine; the others she claims are hers, and can I please move so she can use them.

I’ve been in computing a long time. CoCo, Amiga, PCs, now Linux: I’ve run them all. I’ve never seen a user environment so amazingly well-done as Mac OSX. It’s astonishing. I’m not saying anything new, I know. And the fact that I once hated Macs and now love them is an old refrain, and probably (I said probably) says more about me than it does about the Mac.

But the main reason for this post is really that I’m trying out the new WordPress dashboard widget I found, and I’m staring at a screen so full of eye-candy that I’m seriously contemplating buying a bigger monitor.

Zealot, indeed.