Over the past year I have mulled over my next PC purchase. I had never considered going to a Mac because they just seemed too expensive to risk. So what has changed?
First, I am older and make more money than in my Win Intel hobbyist days. Second, the switch to Intel chips and the subsequent advent of Boot Camp, Parallels, and Fusion mitigated much of the “risk.” I don’t have to abandon Windows completely. Third, I now have a wife and three children. I don’t have the time to do incremental hardware upgrades to my computers anymore, nor spend a lot of time troubleshooting problems. I just want it to work and I want photo and video editing to be as easy as possible. The biggest reason I am moving to a Mac is for iLife. Editing video using MovieMaker and/or Pinnacle is painful. The easiest thing I have found is iMovie/iDVD.
Finally, I got an iPod! I was blow away when I first opened the box. The packaging was as beautiful as the device and the user interface. The iPod lead me to podcasts. I have become addicted to podcasts and videocasts and from those have heard a lot about Macs and OSX. I have to admit that most podcasters have taken up residence in the Steve Jobs distortion field and drink the Apple Kool-Aid by the gallon. However, I think that I have with your help maintained an objective opinion of Apple up to this point. Suffice to say this experience, if nothing else served to educate me about Apple, Mac, and OSX.
I was fortunate to come into the market for a PC when Leopard was delayed last spring and the Vista problems were at there worst. I figured I would wait and see what Leopard would bring to Apple and how Vista would shake out. While I was waiting new iMacs came out and I learned more about Leopard. I also got my first experience with Vista when I helped setup my brother-in-law’s new Vista machine. It was not a bad experience. However, I almost ordered an iMac the day it came out but my wife reminded me how much I had been talking about a laptop. So I waited for a Leopard and a MacBook update.
Yesterday, I ordered my new 2.2Ghz Santa Rosa MacBook. I will keep my Windows XP desktop for my wife and will move all of my stuff onto the Mac. I don’t plan on installing XP or Vista immediately but it is nice to know that I have that option as a safety net. For work all I need is Citrix and VNC. The one thing I am not overly happy about with the MacBook is the white…200 bucks for a black case is crazy.
There are a few things that make me apprehensive about moving to Mac. First, I don’t think that AppleTV is going to be the IPTV device I was hoping for and a Windows Media Center/Extender may have been a better choice from a media perspective. Second, I really think the Zune2 is attractive now that it supports podcasts and wi-fi synching. However, next year when I am ready to retire my iPod for an iPod touch this may be a wash. Also since I still have a perfectly good XP machine I could still get Zune2. Thankfully when I ripped all my CDs I did it in mp3 format and I have resisted the temptation to by music through iTunes so all of my music is portable to another platform or will work just fine with the Apple universe.