A lot of people believe the iPhone to be an example of revolutionary change in personal technology, a pocket computer and communication device that suddenly materialized like something out of Star Trek. I believe the iPhone to be more like the ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey touching the Monolith and then clubbing Windows Mobile and RIM to death with a jawbone, evolution, not revolution, not like the microwave oven at all. One day my mother was breeding salmonella by thawing meat on the kitchen counter all day, the next I am creating lightning by cooking a fork. It is that binary change in perception, from zero to one that bifurcates the world before and after the Intel X-25M SSD.

    The aluminum MacBook is the best consumer portable ever made, at least until the MacBook mini in 2009 or 2010. The MacBook is ruggedly built, beautiful to behold—marred only by its highly glossy screen—and reasonably priced (for Apple). It is also easy to upgrade (especially for Apple). Both memory and storage require little more than removing the battery cover and a few screws, just a single screw in a bracket for the drive. It’s like something you see on 24—not Jack Bauer shooting, torturing, and screaming at people—I am struck by the thought of him having sex, an alternating series of whispers and screams, “give it to me, come on, give it to me—GIVE IT TO ME!”. Or maybe Jennifer Garner in a pink wig from Alias before Ben Affleck filled her with his seed removing a drive and cloning it before terrorists get back from the bathroom is a better example. Apple should rightly be praised for making the MacBook so easy to upgrade the hard drive—or steal it in the name of national security. However, Apple should also be condemned for the process of software installation and user account transference. Here, the terrorists definitely won.

    You would think that the install process for OS X would recognize an unformatted drive, especially since Disk Utility is included on the install DVD. Unfortunately, If you don’t know about Disk Utility, you might think your shiny new SSD is bad. However, once I terminated the install process, ran Disk Utility and formatted the drive, installation was quickly accomplished. Transferring my user account from a Time Machine backup using Migration Assistant was fast too. Too bad it was nearly worthless. All Migration Assistant did was pretty much copy files, and not all files, either. Also missing were preferences, registration data, and any customization I did, even stuff like setting the wallpaper on the Desktop. Even worse, it fucked up file ownership randomly and a couple of accounts in Mail.

    But all that is forgotten once the machine boots for the first time, and it’s a shame OS X doesn’t need to be restarted periodically like Windows because it’s so damn fast now. Likewise, programs that were slow to start, iWeb, Photoshop Elements, iPhoto, to name a few, have become normal, while normal programs are now perceptually instantaneous to start, not that I start programs anymore. I leave everything, even Windows XP in VMware Fusion, running. Virtual memory is virtual no longer, having transcended from the mechanical to the solid state; the end to disk thrashing and spinning beach balls is at hand. That means more battery life too, though how much more I’m unsure, not that bar graphs of battery life matter. The only benchmarks that matter are the ones in my head, and the numbers have changed my world again.

    I have cooked the fork and called the lightning.