We are a fully integrated Mac family now, for better or for worse. For better! (I see your eyeroll and raise you.) After waiting some months for the corporate gods to announce their new product upgrades at the WWDC, we got in touch with our connections and placed the order for the new family laptop. Well, business laptop. Okay, Mrs. Ditchman's laptop. (It's a tax write-off all the same.)

Our "connection" is one of several of my cousins who hail from the Silicon Valley area and who work for that hippest of computer companies and who mentioned last Christmas about the happy and benevolent "Friends & Family" discounts they get. One phone call saved this penny-pinching family a few hundred bucks, so we were very grateful. "It's what it's there for!" said my cousin. What a swell guy.

Mrs. Ditchman seems to have come around. The old banged-up PCs were just piling around the office here; a Gateway tower with that old cow logo on the front, (Cow logo? Always made me wonder) an IBM "Thinkpad" which has padded its thinking capacity with so many plug-ins and third-party apps that it thinks no more, (and therefore, isn't) and then that rhino of a CRT which causes the lights to flicker when you turn it on, its screen's rainbow hues are unviewable now, though we hang on to the beast out of respect for the environment. Anyway, the quick response and sharp images of the new MacBookPro sitting on her desk are a joy to look at. And yet today we have all the computers hooked up, in an attempt to synchronize everything and, as well, pluck the old files out of the dinosaurs. Our office looks like Matthew Broderick's bedroom in Wargames. (Heh.)

Though I know she is busy, it looks as if Mrs. Ditchman has abandoned the concept of transferring the old files altogether. Funny how that is -I've experienced it myself- how you resist the change because all your info is in that one electronic block and you can't possibly leave it behind, and then when you finally make the transition you find you never go back. You don't need it, none of it, like all those boxes in the attic, but one day an old customer will call and their file will be on some archaic hard drive and you'll wish you'd made the effort of the transfer and... ugh. Anyway, I'll get to it. Maybe in a month or two. Maybe never.

I'm not sure how I talked her into Mac, but I believe it had something to do with all our business photos being on my computer, and the need to display the slideshows on a fancy laptop for sales presentations. (Also, the new MacBooks are made of aluminum, so there was a certain mutual metallurgic collaboration that had an appeal.) But I decisively did not talk her into it! I merely pounced when she was amenable to the idea, so now we are all definitively Mac. I find it amusing, diverting, and yet somewhat annoying whenever it fails to live up to Mrs. Ditchman's high expectations after my passionate pitch. Oh, well. It's a computer, not a Fabergé Egg, for crying out loud.

But it's awesome! I sit down at it and she enters, "Hey! What are you doing with my computer!" so she must be getting attached to it. Our music and photos and business files and address books are all (mostly) accessible in the Home Network I've set up here, with the dumb little old iMac downstairs blinking out email and Facebook all day. And all the iPods; car iPod, jobsite iPod, running iPods. And then there's the AppleTV, of course.

So what'd I do? Went out and bought an iPhone. Okay, two of them. Look, we were already on AT&T and our phones were getting old and dumb, as technology does with age. (I forget how many Gs there are in the networks now, but our phones were still on F, or something.) Anyway, the iPhone has finally adjusted down to $99, as opposed to the $599 or whatever ungodly amount it was when the thing first launched, and this seems to me a perfectly reasonable price. How do I like it? HOPPING JEHOVAH IN HEAVEN ABOVE IT IS AWESOME BEYOND ALL MEASURE! No kidding. I love it. It's even better than I thought it was going to be. Now I see what all the huffinanpuffin was about. I'm not going to go into it today, but I just figured I'd let you know. I think it is very sweet.


And, oh, hmmm, here's something interesting, in case I was wondering about our diminished checking account.


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