I’m not quite sure when it happened, but after my Dell laptop died a few months ago, I secretly began lusting after an Apple computer. A MacBook, to be exact. It seemed unnatural, me being a PC guy since the days of my parents’ 286 (it had a Turbo button, people!) and 4-color monitor. For 18+ years, it was DOS and Windows. Sure, my uncle had a Macintosh, but that thing was weird. The screen was black and white! I couldn’t use one of those things. I had four colors, man. And so continued my blind devotion to the “PC” world unabated, even mostly unscathed by Windows ME. Nevertheless, gears were recently set in motion that I could not control.
Somehow, I ended up here, typing this post up on my brand new MacBook. Something happened. I’m pretty sure it’s not all that bad.
Welcome to the family!
I have been thinking about making the same switch. My only fear is compatibility with various common programs in the microsoft family and other common add on programs. Thoughts?
Good luck with the transition. It’s relatively painless and you’ll most likely never go back to PCs.
Welcome to the club. However, do not post in WordPress using Safari. Trust me on this.
@Steve – if you’re doing the same thing I am, I think you would be fine. You can get Office for it pretty cheap. It’s all compatible. Plus, you can install Windows on it. I’ll boot it up using Parallels every now and then if I have to do something Windows specific.
Get iWork (for Keynote alone if you do presentaitons or speaking…amazing!) and Office 2008 for Mac student edition.
Quicksilver will change your life.
Back when I was a consultant on contract at AOL I had a test lab to run software on different operating systems. We had one of the latest Macs (sorry, couldn’t tell you which one) and a beta copy of Vista.
Man, I learned to hate Vista and since testing was optional for that platform I just gave up on it after awhile. The software ran fine, but reinstalling a clean copy and then waiting for everything to fire off when running the tests was a huge pain.
The Mac, on the other hand, had a beautiful interface. Don’t think I’d ever type that sentence. It was fast but everything was slick. I got the impression it was everything Vista was trying to be.
One of us…
One of us…
Our office is slowly changing (I like to think evolving) to all Macs. Vista hasn’t sold anyone and as soon as some of us started doing OS X development, the rest started to get hooked.
PCs are for gaming and Macs are for other stuff. Interestingly, I consider myself a PC gamer, but if Apple opened itself up more in the beginning, I’d probably be playing my games on it now. However, they let that part of the market go, underestimating its importance.
Regardless, I’m more of a desktop user than a laptop user. However, if I had to buy a laptop, I’d most certainly buy an Apple–they just make better laptops than the competition. Of course, I wouldn’t be buying it with the intentiont o game.
All of these welcomes make me feel so at home! It’s like it’s a cult or something. Thanks!
@Nat – What is Quicksilver? And as far as Safari, the first thing I did was download Firefox 🙂
@Alex – My Dell laptop was a pretty decent gaming laptop, I played EVE Online without a problem. But I’m not much of a PC gamer, so I doubt much gaming will be happening on my MacBook.
Congrats on the switch. I was die hard anti-Mac through college when all my friends had them, but after the Intel switch, I broke down and got one and haven’t looked back. I boot into Windows to play Civ4, but other than that it is all OSX.
Oh, and get Firefox 3 Beta 5 for OSX rather than Firefox 2. It is about 6x faster and has a lot of other great fixes.
@Tony
http://www.blacktree.com/
Quicksilver will change the way you use your computer. You can almost do anything with it.