Ever since I got iWork I've been importing as many Word documents into Pages as possible to figure out what will and won't break it. Up till recently things were looking quite good, but one of Vinney's law documents wouldn't import at all and I'm not certain why. I haven't had time to look through it and pinpoint what it was that broke it but the fact that there is at least one document out there that wouldn't import at all is a little disappointing. From what I can tell the document itself didn't use any fancy Word features, it was just a normal Word doc - but I'll dig deeper soon. For what it's worth, TextEdit opened it just fine.

The rest of the documents I've imported all work fine, except sometimes I'll get a font doesn't exist or character shading not supported warning, but nothing else major.

I realized I hadn't timed the installation of iLife '05 on the mini, so I decided to do that today - 23 minutes. That's 23 minutes for the actual installation portion of iLife on the mini - Apple needs to ship these things with iLife '05 preinstalled asap. Of course I'm talking about installing a 4GB application suite from DVD onto a 2.5" laptop HDD, but still :)

That brings me to another point - having applications and games shipping on DVDs, I can't even begin to describe how great it is to install everything from DVD. I think this is actually a smaller part of a much larger story though. The early adopter nature of the Mac platform is something that can definitely appeal to the enthusiast PC buying population. I can't even count the number of times that I wished floppies would go away, or that we'd do away with parallel/serial ports on motherboards, but the problem always ends up being backwards compatibility for the masses. A platform built almost entirely around early adoption is quite appealing to the PC enthusiast in me, I just don't think Apple has done a good job of actually marketing to that group of people.

I was thinking about this the other day - it wouldn't be too difficult for Apple to put together a box that would actually suit the needs of the PC enthusiast (other than the mini), they would just have to actually put the time into doing it. A user upgradable G5 - offer CPU upgrades, allow for custom SPD programming on memory modules so that users can use whatever memory they'd like (although offer a default setting that will reject all non-Apple approved memory) and the HDD/storage upgrades are already pretty much covered. Throw in a handful of overclocking options (and if Apple did it we'd probably actually get a good interface for once) and obviously do whatever it takes to target a lower price point. Even throw in a flash upgrade kit to convert PC video cards to work on Macs, something that end users could flash on their PCs - after all, the PC versions of Mac video cards are generally cheaper anyways. It's wishful thinking but it is a way to address a community that I think would be very appreciative of some of the features of the platform.

At 2:20AM on a Saturday morning - it's back to work for me :)

Take care and enjoy the weekend.