I thought I would start by giving some background, so you can see I'm not quite the
stereotypical Mac user or even novice PC user. I have a degree in computer engineering and have worked in IT-type jobs for about 20 years, mostly programming on and supporting various versions of Windows. When I went to school for the first time, I took a PC with me. In my second year, I found myself spending a lot of time in the school's Mac lab cranking out papers and using Excel and CricketDraw. This led to me getting my first Mac, a Mac IIsi, which got me through the rest of my undergrad and Master's degrees. My next Mac was a PowerMac 7500 around 1995. That machine is still running, two processor upgrades, and a lot of memory and disk later. We use it as our server, and it's on 24x7 running Mac OS X 10.3 (upgrading to 10.4 is a summer project...). I replaced it as my day-to-day machine with a dual-USB iBook (G3/500) in 2001, and finally upgraded that to a Mac Mini a few months ago. The Mini is a temporary solution, since I'm waiting to get a dual-G5 after I go back to school (just waiting for the 2.5GHz machines to reach a reasonable price, and/or to get dual core PowerPCs). The Mini is decked out to become our media server in the living room, a task now relegated to my wife's old Powerbook G3 (connected to an
El Gato EyeTV USB). This whole setup is wired together with a combination 100Mbps switched ethernet and 802.11b (Apple Airport "Snow") network.
There is actually a PC in there, as well. Last year, my wife started an online degree for which a PC was
required (we toyed with the idea of using an emulator, but decided to go with a basic PC just to be sure it would work). So, I build a machine from an
ASUS barebone. Had to be small because it had to fit next to the 7500 on the stand... I'll save the story of that project and how it fits into my thinking about the Tablet for another post.
I've also had the whole range of handhelds, from an Apple Newton MessagePad 100, to a couple of different Palms, to a PocketPC. Got that in 2002 because of its multimedia capabilities. I tried to do things like read PDF files on it, but the screen is just too small. I even got it
syncing up with the Mac (no small technical feat in Microsoft land -- kudos to Mark/Space), but I ultimately ended up using it as way to listen to
internet radio over wifi. I got slightly burned on this deal because I bought a Casio E-200; Casio left the PocketPC market soon after, so when my battery finally died, I couldn't see spending any money for a new battery on a dead-end machine. But, this whole experience got me to looking at the TabletPC to do all of those things I couldn't realistically do on the PocketPC.
So that's where I'm coming from, and the environment the TabletPC has to
seamlessly fit into.