I finally did it. I bought a Mac. A MacBook Pro,
to be specific. I've been a PC guy since 1990. So how did this happen?
I remember I wanted a Mac back in the late
1980s. The interface was cool. (Remember those blue monochrome screens on those
first generation Macs?) And I
remember thinking the mouse was a cool idea as well. But Macs were expensive, and I
didn't have much money. So I sold a bunch of stuff and bought my first computer
in 1990,
a little XT with an amber monochrome monitor and a 20 megabyte hard drive. No
Windows back then. I was running...I think Dos 3.3. I got a disk that taught me
DOS commands. I made my own little menu out of batch files and ran Word Perfect.
After that I just moved up over the years. 386, 486, Pentium, and so on. Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, and XP.
During that time I amassed a lot of software and thousands of documents.
Consider this: I have every document I've produced for our church in the last 10
years in Microsoft
Publisher. I've been using FrontPage since 1997. You get sort of stuck in a
system. And for someone like me, who has no problem doing whatever I need to do
with a PC, there had to be a compelling reason to change. Because you KNOW a
change will be painful.
You know, the Mac's got the same shit we got
over here,
but it's the little differences.
So what tipped the scale?
First, I'm sick of Microsoft. I'm sick of
Windows. I'm sick of installing the latest version of Windows and watching it
slow to a crawl 6 months later, because it's full of spyware and patches and
stranded temporary files from the scores of times I had to shut it down by
turning off the power because it was hung up. I'm sick of looking down and seeing my system tray full
of stuff using my resources, and I don't even know how some of it got there. I'm
sick of little windows popping open every 30 minutes telling me I need to update
this or that or install a security patch of some kind.
I'm tired of Windows. It seems bloated and
inefficient and ridiculous. What is Windows XP doing for me, substantively, that
Windows 95 wasn't doing? What is Word 2003 doing for me that Word 97 wasn't
doing? I have computers that are so much more powerful than the ones I ran in
the 90s, but I'm doing the same old stuff. And still dragging along.
Yeah.
So I needed a new computer anyway. My old notebook is
2.5 years old, and when you have as much critical data on a computer as I do, it's not a
bad idea to consider buying a new one every few years. Do I want Vista on my new
computer? The problems are probably exaggerated, but I think it's clear Vista
isn't any cleaner and less cumbersome. The answer to that is NO. So I decided I
was going to bite the bullet and transition to a clean operating system. For me
that meant Linux
Ubuntu or Macintosh. I looked long and hard
at this. Ubuntu is apparently wonderful. Runs like a Olympic sprinter on 1 gig
of RAM. But Ubuntu is the sort of thing serious techies can run. I'd be stuck
with mainly open source software, and let's face it - open source software gets
the job done, but the interface isn't always as friendly. I'm sorry nerds, Gimp
is no substitute for Photoshop if you've been using Photoshop for 7 or 8 years.
Even so, I was about to go Ubuntu because I could
get a $1600 notebook and put Ubuntu on it and go gangbusters, or so they say.
Then I saw Mac OS X
Leopard and
Parallels. I can run Windows XP inside a
window on a Mac? I can run Publisher in there so that I don't have to convert
the 1500 church documents I have nicely laid out? I can still run Frontpage? And what did you say? I can copy and paste back and forth from
Windows to the Mac?
Game over. I'm now an uber-cool, smug Mac user.
I hate PCs now. I don't even want to handle them unless I have to. I rather
resent seeing XP come up on my beautiful Leopard desktop. I'm watching those
"I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials and just laughing, shaking my head at poor
old pathetic PC. I'm even considering
revising my own personal computer history. What was probably happening was that
I was just a spy for Macintosh all those years. Yeah, that's what it was. I was
undercover or something. Deep undercover. I'll work out the details of the story later.
In the meantime, here's a picture my Macintosh
took of me this morning. She (of course my Mac is a she) suggested 4-up sepia,
shadowed on a gray background. I was sleepy so I said, "Just do whatever you
want, sweetheart."
rlp
ps - I will post a
listing of all the difficult transitions, and there are a number of them. Give
me a couple of weeks. Oh, and if you plan to run Parallels, you better get as
much processor as you can and 2 gig of Ram. I mean, you are running to complete
operating systems and software to help them play nice.
