Never going back…
Well, after a month with my MacBook Pro, I have to say that I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Windows full time. I’ve become part of the cult, the chosen, the blessed. That doesn’t mean I’m completely abandoning Windows, it just means that Windows may only live on servers and virtual machines for me from now on.
I had been wanting to make the leap for awhile, and now that I have, I find that there’s really nothing on Windows that I can’t live without. There are two pieces of software that I don’t have any immediate alternative for. Domino Designer and Yahoo Music Unlimited. Obviously, DomDesigner is coming along on Eclipse, which means that eventually I might actually see it native on the Mac too. Yahoo Music Engine (with it’s protected subscription-based music server) will never go Mac, and for some reason I don’t see Mr. Jobs doing subscription music in iTunes. ‘Tis okay, I’ll always be running a Domino server on my network on Windows, so I can run the music software there.
Right now I do have Parallels up all the time, simply because I’ve been using the Notes 8 Beta exclusively for the past couple months, and as we all know, the Mac versions of Notes stuff lag behind by about six months or so. But, if I wanted to use 7.0.2 of Notes, I could pretty much stay all Mac, all the time.
Macs aren’t perfect, I do get the rainbow beachball of death unexpectedly at times, but compared to Windows this this is pretty crash free.
My mother-in-law has Vista on a pretty beefy laptop and it has way more problems than I’ve encountered here. And other than the pretty graphics, I don’t know what benefit you really get with Vista. At least until DirectX 10 games are out in full force. But, I’ve been doing more of my gaming on the XBox 360 lately anyway, so it’s a not a huge deal. Even if it was, there’s always Boot Camp.
I’ll probably go into more detail in future posts, but for now, just know that I “switched” from Windows to Mac, didn’t miss a beat, and never looked back. I imagine that if you read this blog, you could have very similar results.
June 19, 2007 @ 9:11 am
Congrats, man. Glad to hear the switch went well. I was at a tech conference last week, and the attendees were all techs in the education sector like me. There was no end to the Vista complaints, and the two separate Linux sessions were the most popular.
I’m seeing the same thing with Vista, performance-wise. It’s a pig. I’ve got two ThinkPad T60’s here at work with good specs, and they crawl. A friend bought a Dell XPS with all the bells and whistles and it’s slow to respond in comparison to XP. Even turning off the eye candy only gets you so far.
Mike
June 19, 2007 @ 3:43 pm
we have three macs at home now. my wife was the first to take the plunge, then i got one, and now my daughter has one too. hehe. macs rock. leopard looks pretty darn sweet too. an OS i might actually want to pay to upgrade to, imagine!