Over the last few days, I’ve been pondering My World According to Apple (MWAA), and whether it makes sense to rid myself of the Quad G5, orienting myself to a more mobile, agile and reactive computing experience. That’s a lot of words that basically add up to:

• making my stuff at home accessible from anywhere
• lightening the load of my home office on the power grid, pocketbook and environment
• taking my show on the road easier, and…..
• SHOOTING MORE!

That’s not too much to ask, is it? 😉

So, in an effort to get my little world more mobile, I picked up a Mini-DVI to DVI cable over the weekend, and strapped my 20″ ACD to the MacBook, and was able to make it all work the way I wanted. One victory!

However, in trying to work with some images from a friend — large images, >200MB — in Photoshop and Bridge, I was drowning the poor little MacBook. Two things might play in this: only 1GB of RAM, and CS2.

OWC claims they have taken the MacBooks to 3GB, and have proven demonstratable performance gains moving from 2GB to 3GB, despite the worries that Apple has about doing that. More memory is better, and their charts seem to prove that.

And then there’s CS2. On the MacBook, it’s running with Rosetta, and that’s a swineful way to go about business. More memory’ll help that, but CS3 running native Intel code will probably be the bigger benefit.

So, will more RAM and native code help with my choking the Little MacBook That Could on large images? Maybe. Until I prove it some way or another though, the jury’s still out. And that leaves me with a quandry……

To G5, or not to G5 — that is the question.

It’s kinda like buying an Ferrari, but only really needing its performance every once in a while, so you end up driving the Jetta more often. That’s sorta where I am with my MacBook and my Quaddy. So I end up straddling the fence about moving in the direction I wanna go — mobile, agile, compute/shoot/edit anywhere — and the beauty, mystery and seductiveness of this gargantuan box sitting under my desk at home.

In truth, I think I have to be true to the vision of myself and where/how I wanna work. That means moving towards my mobile experience, and continue the plans to move off the Quad G5 as best I can.

In that vein, there’s been a couple of posts brought to my attention today that really address that. TUAW did a piece on mobile broadband on the Mac, and brought everything out of the woodwork — EVDO (which I’m on right now), satellite, etc. Good article, and did nothing to sway me away from the choice I made to go with Sprint’s network for my EVDO connection. It’s rock solid, has worked everytime I’ve fired it up, and has been nothing but speedy.

The other article ponders a Bedouin workforce. The premise here is that the workers of this kind of office are very mobile, and can really work just about anywhere, both individually and in teams. Greg Olsen’s musing goes on to ponder some of the very same issues I’m noodling over. His may be more source code centric, but the problem’s the same — how do I access, protect and utilize a datastore of images from afar? How do I make changes, additions and sales from that repository while sitting nowhere near it? It’s a great problem to think about.

I’m not the only one thinking like this, and that’s a good thing. It surely means that others have some miles on these kinds of solutions, with some nice answers out there. Perhaps I can come up with additional ideas to help further my solution, and maybe help someone else along the way.

Watch out! The road from here may get a little bumpy!