I don't know what to do. I need a rendezvous

Forget about the sacking of this blogger; what I'm about to tell you is heresy where I work. Seriously, I honestly think there may be some small-print in my contract that would enable them to burn me at the stake for saying this....

I'm thinking about buying an Apple Mac.

Really.

I spend pretty much all my working day in front of a computer. I work 50-odd hours a week (well, I'm at work for 50-odd hours a week anyway - they definitely get their 37.5 hours). When I get home, I often shut myself away in a room and spend hours messing about on my desktop PC.

Not for much longer. I have seen the wireless light, and I am going to get me a laptop and a wireless network so I can spend that time sat downstairs on the sofa with my lovely girlfriend AND spend hours messing about on my computer.

Hurray! Who says I am lacking in social skills?

Anyway. I had been planning to just get hold of a reasonable laptop PC with a Centrino chip [DING! bong-bong-bong-bong etc.] and a little network. Then I looked at a mac, and what follows is probably exactly what Steve Jobs is hoping to hear people say..... Now, I've had my Ipod for 18 months (3G 30Gb, 4000-0dd songs, most recent:"The Blowers Daughter" covered by Snow Patrol) . The Ipod is the most fantastic thing ever and I love it to bits. For pretty much this reason alone, it didn't take me long to think of having a look at their laptops. I know they look great, but I actually went and had a look at what people say about them performance-wise, and started to research how I could hang a PC and a Mac on the same wireless network.

Apparently you can.

I need strange and worrying sounding things like a router.... but it is certainly something I am thinking about. My initial thoughts are to go for something like a 15" G4 1.5GHz powerbook together with an airport for wireless access and a router to make sure that I can split my NTL cable broadband properly. I would then be able to run an ethernet cable from my desktop PC to the router, and connect to my work laptop (coffee repairs permitting) and my new PowerBook wirelessly.......

That's the plan anyway, although as always with this kind of stuff, there's a very real risk that I will buy all the stuff and completely fail to make it work.

I'm off down to London next Saturday, so I might pop into the Apple Store on Regent's Street and have a look about and to have a chat with an expert at the Genius Bar (it's handily just next door the RM Williams store - I need to pick up some shoes from there whilst I'm at it)

Oh... it sounds so easy, doesn't it? Plug and play? Work straight out of the box?

You just know this will bring me pain. It will cost an arm and a leg. I will spend hours trying to connect the router and reboot the cable modem. I will curse and swear at the airport and why I can't make it work. I will spit and scream at the unfamiliar Mac OS and the single button mouse. I will tear out what is left of my hair trying to work out how to move my Itunes library from the PC to the Mac and to reformat the Ipod itself....

If you think this post is boring - boy - you just wait until I blog about THAT (and hopefully quite quickly thereafter the first entry I post from my sofa using the mac.....)

Any thoughts on macs in general, and all tips about setting up a wireless network with a mac and a PC on it.... please share!

Oh.

And don't mention this to my employer.