Last weekend I experimented with GarageBand's built-in guitar amp modeling. My god. I could not believe the sounds I was getting, and just from default settings! I don't know if Apple's amp modeling is done in-house or not, but it certainly rivals anything I've heard from Line 6. I did some rock demos that to my ear sound like they were cut in Butch Vig's garage, and I didn't use a single microphone.

Apple software is amazing. At some point in the past few years, Apple figured out how get the software out of the user's way and just let you make stuff. It goes beyond the user interface stuff and deep into the product itself.

For example, iMovie comes with a limited set of filters and transitions, so you can add special effects to a clip or make fancy jump cuts. But here's the genius: you only get a handful of filters, but those filters are nearly perfect with default settings. If you're a knob-twiddler you won't appreciate this, but iMovie is not about knob-twiddling, it's about letting you make a damn movie on your laptop.

This tendency toward ease, toward letting you make something, is even more evident in GarageBand. There's no "mixer view" like you'd get with Logic or ProTools, but who cares. The stock instruments actually sound good, and while you can tweak the settings of plug-in effects as much as you like, the default settings of the various reverbs, compressors, EQs are so good, you can almost sense the hand of some anonymous Apple engineer who had the good sense to say "hey, how awesome would it be if whoever uses this thing doesn't have to mess with it?"

And then there are those guitar amp modelers. It's almost comical.

I'm a late, reluctant Apple convert. I had one of the first iBooks and grew to hate early OSX, nothing seemed ready for any serious work. I tend to view computers as I do automobiles. For some people, a car is a lifestyle expression. For me, a car is a chair on four wheels that takes me where I want to go. I've only owned one new car in my lifetime, and I chose the basest base model I could find because I truly do not give a damn. Likewise, I never cared that my main machine was a beige box so long as it let me do the stuff I wanted.

For me, the switch to a MacBook was not for fashion-forward reasons but because I just wanted stuff to work, good lord why can't this stuff just work instead of requiring me to don scuba gear and go cave-diving into the Settings menu, scanning ad-laden messageboard posts for out-of-date clues as to what this ASIO error means and why that driver doesn't work because it's not ported to 64-bit yet and suddenly it's two or three hours down the drain and I really wanted to record vocals tonight but now I'm tired and I have to be at work early tomorrow and screw this, I just want to make this one thing, why is all this stuff in my way?

This is how the world ends, not in fire or ice, nor with a bang or whimper, but when everything can be done satisfactorily on a MacBook Pro.