I’ve recently replaced my ancient Power Mac G4 with a shiny new iMac system.

Now, given that my last Mac was built in July of 2001, I knew I’d be in for a few stumbling blocks when moving forward with a much more advanced system. Many of my old utilities and such would no longer work, as the G4 was a PowerPC processor, and Apple has long since moved on to Intel architecture. No big deal, as the upgrades were certainly welcomed!

The annoyance, however, was the unexpected stuff.

First off…no music! I store my music files on an external hard drive. This makes things easy to back up, and if my Mac ever has a meltdown, then they’re safe. Well, the crappy Oxford 911 chipset in my FireWire enclosure is incompatible with the new Macs! Damn it. I had hoped to hold out and buy a new drive and new enclosure, since my music drive is starting to run out of space…but no such luck. I had to buy the enclosure now; the new drive will just have to wait, as I’ve spent enough money as it is.

More irritating than that, however, is the lack of Palm syncing support under Snow Leopard, the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system. I don’t blame Apple for this lack of compatibility; in fact, the blame lies squarely at Palm’s feet. When they released their new Pre system, they touted it as an iPhone killer, and gave it the ability to sync with iTunes. Well, you’re not supposed to do that, jackass. Apple responded by blocking their devices. (Note: Palm legacy devices still sync with the outdated Palm Desktop software, but not with the actual Address Book and iCal applications built into OS X, which defeats the entire purpose.)

Anyway, I use an old Zire 71 PDA for all my address book and calendar needs…and it’s practically a paperweight with the new iMac. So, I’m required to buy a third-party utility, Missing Sync. More cash I wasn’t planning on! Nice going, Palm.

Stumbling blocks aside, working on a speedy new system sure beats the fits of rage I’d fly into when YouTube would stutter on my old Mac. When your CPU can’t even keep up with low-end streaming video…then it’s definitely time to upgrade.

And most importantly of all, I had no problems transferring over my lovely Grace Park wallpaper.