I was shocked to see your post under the "What are you playing?" thread. Glad to hear from you and it sounds like you have been busy over the past few months/years. Don't stay away so long next time. The forums are not as popular or active as in the past, but all the regulars still drop by from time-to-time.

I have to admit that I have been busy over the last few years also. My wife and I had a another baby boy who is 2-yars old now. That same year I got laid off from my job that I had for 13-years. After being laid off I decided to start my own freelance web design and development business (http://cnc137.com)(I need to finish/update the site when I get time.) that has been doing well and keeping me busy. I also got a part-time job doing IT support for a group of 9 family physicians and their 40 to 50 employees which also keeps me busy.

I just built a Hackintosh over the holidays and I bought my wife a MacBook Air, so I am also learning the ins and outs of Mac OS X. I have a Dell Mini 9 that I put Snow Leopard on a few years ago, so I am not totally a noob, but I'm still learning and still know a lot more abut Windows than OS X.

Glad to see you back and I hope you are doing well.

Thanks for the welcome!

Congrats on the having the baby and sorry to hear about losing your job. I know how tough that is, I lost mine before I joined the military and even back then, when the economy was better, it was tough finding a job. I'm glad to see you worked out a somewhat for you.

My wife, a huge iPhone fan, wanted a Mac, so I got her the 27" one last summer. She loved it and I loved it as well. After the release of iCloud/iTunes Match (which fixed most of my issues with iOS and OSX) I decided bite the bullet and get myself a Macbook Pro. It's the lower model 13" one, but it works well for me lugging it back and forth to school and work. I also purchased a used iPad 2, which I'm loving as well. Finally think I'm going to go all in when my AT&T upgrade comes available in March and get the iPhone. I love the Android OS, but like I said, Apple has fixed most of the problems I had with it, so might as well go all in.

I almost got the Air. I love the size and design, but I want a laptop that I can upgrade later down the line if I need too, and the Pro lets me do that.

Anyway, thanks for the welcome. I was browsing through my old desktop as I worked to get all my music off the multitude of machines I have here and ran into PSO:BB installed on one of them. Brought back good memories of this place so I figured I would come back around and see what's up. Nice to see all the old faces!

I went back and forth between the 13" Macbook Pro and the 13" MacBook Air for my wife. I liked also that the MBP could be upgraded to 8GB of RAM and to a different hard drive, but I liked the higher screen resolution of the MacBook Air (1440x900 compared to 1280x800). She will probably be fine with the 4GB of RAM and I wanted to upgrade the MBP to an SSD for her if I got it, so they ended up being around the same price if I did that. I got the MBA at Best Buy for $1,185 with tax and 18-months same as cash. The MBP was $1,000 at Micro Center, but a 120GB SSD drive would've been around $150, so it would've worked out to be about the same price as the Air.

I think she likes the MacBook Air but would've liked the Pro just as much. It was a tough decision and in my opinion the MBP should have the higher resolution also. If it did then I probably would've went for the MBP instead.

We already have iPhone 4s and I have a 1st generation iPad and we really enjoy them. I was going to use iCloud and I need to look into it more, but haven't had the time. When I 1st tried iCloud on my iPhone it told me I was over the limit for the free account, since I have every photo still on my phone from when I got the original iPhone. I think I have around 2,000 or 3,000 photos on it. I was over the free 5GB iCloud account limit and didn't want to pay a monthly fee to use it. I guess I should remove some of those old photos and that would solve the problem, but I haven't get around to doing that yet.

Yea, the screen resolution was one of the things that was keeping my eye on the Air. When I compared them side by side at the Apple store, you could definitely tell the difference. Now that I have it had home, maybe I've just become accustom to it, but it doesn't bother me at all. I also loved the form factor of the Air. Definitely light and easy to transport. My Pro is definitely weightier, but both are a long ways away from the brick I was carrying before.

Yea, I had a iPhone 3G back in the day but had long switched over to Android, so I was a newb to the cloud. That was what I loved about Android though, the ability for my contacts, calendar, music, email, etc to be synced across all my devices. Now that iCloud does that, I have no real complaint against them anymore. While I do wish their "walled garden" concept wasn't so restrictive, I get their point and I have yet to find something that I could do on my Android that I can't on my iPhone, closed or not.