Welcome to The 'Book Beat

Paul Brierley is a 25 year old university administrator living "across the pond" in the north east of England. He's been a regular visitor to Low End Mac for three years, and attributes his passion for the Mac to LEM.

He says, "Whilst wondering whether or not to 'switch', I spent a lot of time reading the site. Eventually I bought a £20 SE/30 off eBay and was converted. Within a month I'd bought an iBook G4, which became my main machine. Since then I've added an LC 475 and PowerBook 5300 to the collection."

His main machine is a Dual 1.8 GHz G5 (thanks to a discount from a local retailer). He spent half of 2004 working as a Mac salesman!

Paul considers the SE/30 "one of the most amazingly well designed pieces of computer equipment" ever created. His SE/30 is "maxed out" with 128 MB of RAM, and he can switch between a network card and a color video PDS card. He has even had OS 8.0 running on it.

His student years away from parents and supporting himself taught Paul plenty about budgeting and frugality. "Okay, so the dual processor G5 was a bit of a treat, but that aside I try my utmost to get the most from my money. I'm very strongly into recycling, and am beginning to build up something of a bookshelf on life in a post-oil society."

Paul describes himself as a wannabe OS X Cocoa programmer. His job is running the timetable for a university in England, he has an addiction to both cups of tea and chocolate in all forms, and he doesn't own a car and has resisted doing so for environmental reasons - although he realize he will have to cave on that one some day.

• Who cares about Apple's market share?, 2006.08.24. Market share and installed base are not only nebulous, but ultimately unimportant as long as Apple continues to turn a profit.
• Moving files from your new Mac to your vintage Mac, 2006.06.13. Old Macs use floppies; new ones don't. Old Macs use AppleTalk; Tiger doesn't support it. New Macs can burn CDs, but old CD drives can't always read CD-R. So how do you move the files?
• Hands-on with an iBook leads to on-the-spot conversion, 2006.04.26. After years with Windows, the Mac OS provided a mixture of awe at the graphics, surprise that Office runs, amazement that it works so easily with digicams and third-party monitors, and disbelief about the lack of malware.
• Apple, IBM, and Intel: The choice was clear, and the transition says a lot about Apple, 2006.02.13. Apple's history is full of change, and when it became obvious that IBM was pushing power while Intel was switching the focus to efficiency, the time was right to move Apple to Intel.
• New tech parallels and perils: PowerBook 5300 and MacBook Pro, 2006.02.06. Ten years ago, Apple's PowerBook 5300 was known for flaming batteries, sluggish performance, and underperforming emulation. Has Apple learned their lesson, or will the MacBook Pro repeat history?
• 10 things new classic Mac owners should know, 2005.12.06. New to compact Macs? Ten things you really should know before you get too confused.
• Bringing a PowerBook 520 back from the dead, 2005.11.28. Although the old PowerBook wouldn't even start at first, Apple's software eventually permitted some reconditioning of its ancient batteries.

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