In case you didn’t figure it out from my posts a few weeks ago, I got a new computer. A MacBook Pro. No, it wasn’t a grand conversion and no I am not drinking the kool-aid. I’ve been getting a lot of pressure from friends and colleagues to give the Mac a chance. So I did. It’s been a pretty good experience so far. Am I glad I made the switch? I’ll let you know in a few more weeks.

Does my lack of enthusiasm disappoint you mac-heads? Sorry, but it’s just my own experience. So here is my personal experience.

History

I grew up on the Mac. I wrote every school paper from kindergarten through college (okay, I didn’t write any papers in kindergarten) on a Mac. I remember having two disk drives, one for MacWrite and the other to save my work on. However, I got to college and was very alone in the PC world. When I would go to the store to look at software and games, I was always disappointed by the lack of Mac titles. Just after graduating from College, I decided to leave Apple and I had absolutely no regrets. That was about 9 years ago. Interestingly enough, just after I left Apple, the Mac started to get a little cool. The iMacs were shaking things up in the PC world… but I was still happy with my switch.

Why I switched

I won’t beat around the bush here. There are three reasons why I switched and they are pretty straight forward.

1. It wasn’t too big of a risk. I do more and more of my work on Web 2.0 applications that do not depend on what OS I am running. So, I didn’t feel that switching to Apple will get in the way of a lot of the things I do on the computer.

2. Vista helped push me to leave. My new laptop at work was a Vista machine. The IT director at my church is a Apple fan boy and his personal opinion is that “Vista doesn’t suck any more than XP did.” Now I don’t really agree. After two months on Vista, I was ready for something different. I was on the fastest machine I’ve ever had with the most memory I’ve ever had and my experience was amazingly slow and sluggish. I figured it was a little unlikely that I could downgrade back to XP on my PC (I’m sure I could if I had begged) but I had a different strategy….

3. XP on my Mac Book Pro. I know you Apple purists will hate me for saying this, but having a stable version of XP on my Mac was the main reason I was cool with going Mac. Seriously. I have XP loaded on VM Ware fusion and the experience is pretty amazing. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t power up my Mac and launch right into XP. I’m taking the time to get used to the OSX interface and figure it out. However, there are some programs that I have installed only on XP and I venture over to that side of my Mac to get some things done. I’m super busy right now and I don’t have the time to figure out how to do it on a Mac. So for now, I’ll rely on XP to get stuff done, but I’m getting better that the OSX every day.

Final thoughts

Am I glad I switched? I think so. There have been some bugs…(I’ll tell about them later) but for the most part it has been a pretty good experience.