Laurence, I hear the “good, closed” system argument, but something in my gut is not happy about it. It is odd that this bothers me. So there must still be something to learn that I have not figure out yet. My current phone contract ends in June and I don’t see an iPhone in my future and I wonder how much of that is my own stubbornness?

I’m currently holidaying with some friends who have built their ‘retirement’ home on the Coral Coast of Fiji. Its been raining a lot so we have spent some productive (many) hours getting their wireless modem working across the ‘estate’ and then getting the plethora of PCs connected and working. Many hours on the xyz forums but eventually got the puzzles solved

Of course I brought my iphone, ipad and macair with me…they all connected without a hitch!

But back to my ‘modified’ principles …. A good ‘closed’ system will always beet an open system….its just that their are precious few good ‘closed’ systems. Apple just happens to be a rare exception.

PS … I’m looking at Apple TV and rationalizing all my media to one big media drive from which I can stream to all my (Apple) devices … wireless of course.

One other thought is that you might want to hang onto the Roku (unless it’s not HD.) Roku specializes in streaming services, where the Blue-Ray player may not have the same quality and extent of services.

My wifey is not a fellow iPad user and will probably find, like you, that it’s the preferred travel device.

Enjoyed the post!
-Dave

We’ve been using OS X for some time now and have been very happy. It isn’t perfect, but the amount of tech support is much less than what is required for Windows (still) and way less than Linux. I’m fairly geekish, but with age like focusing on problems other than keeping my computers and network running. Apple provides a very natural way to share music among devices and a nifty feature called Airplay allows you to stream any content from an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone to Airplay enabled speakers or an Apple Airport (Apple’s name for wifi devices) that might be connected to a home entertainment system. There is also a $99 device called an Apple TV, which is basically wifi with Airplay and also video to your digital tv.

The Apple kit we’ve had has been robust. I replaced my laptop at 6 years old and Sukie at 5 – but she hastened that by killing her with a glass of lemonade. Hers still works, but the screen was fried – so we use it as a headless server. If you need to get geekish OS X is roughly BSD Unix underneath (the kernel is Mach) and unix-y stuff is possible. I’m a BSD person and greatly prefer it to Linux when I need to be doing stuff that is beyond normal applications.

You can dual boot into Windows on a Mac if you like. I don’t, but know a lot of people who do for compatibility at work. Office for Mac is about one version back from Windows – but is robust according to friends. I don’t use Office and am happy with alternatives.

iMacs are a nice value. Even the basic model is way more than people need. Mine is a few years old with a 24″ screen. The larger screens are too big in a way — at distances I sit from the computer I have to move my head back and forth to see the whole screen on the really big monitors, so I went with the 24″. In truth I would probably be happy with the 20″ on the basic machine.

Enough of our needs have moved to the iPad that iMacs and iPads may make more sense than keeping laptops too. It is funny how this changes with time. We still only have one iPad. I use my iPhone for as a portable computing device when I travel these days … of the past 5 trips I’ve only taken the laptop once.

Drop me a line if you have any questions on OS X setups … it may or may not be a good path for you.