Yes, I have joined the dark side!
My old laptop wasn’t cutting it anymore and annoying me so much (it’s almost 3 and a half years old) so I decided it was time to replace it. I’ve been unimpressed with most newer PC laptops (and the glossy nature of all their LCDs!) and I don’t care much for running Vista (I feel microsoft has not innovated much since windows 2000) so I started to look at the mac lineup again. The current macbooks are now running Intel Core 2 Duo processors (which I love) and they have nice LCDs and a few features many PC laptops are missing. I began regularly checking the apple refurb site hoping one of these newer laptops would show up. Finally last week while I was on vacation I happened to check the site in the morning and the mac book pro I wanted was up! I logged in as Lori to leverage the apple educator discount and ordered myself a 15” Mac Book Pro with the 2.16 Core 2 Duo processor. To my surprise a few days later the laptop had arrived (nice free shipping!) and I had a new toy to tweak.
So far I am really impressed with this laptop, it’s fast and very functional (though the touch pad lacks a RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON). I have Windows XP running through parallels so I can still use a few applications and I plan on eventually using bootcamp so I can still use 3DSMax (though it does work ok through Parallels via software video mode). Oh, they give you a white apple logo sticker so you can stick it on your car… but I don’t plan on doing that! I’ll post more later.
once you go mac…you never go back or something like that.
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For personal use I’ll run OSX/Mac. Work will still require PCs (3D applications, CAD, Photoshop on the same machine) but I’m sure eventually more Windows apps will be ported over.
The way I look at it, Microsoft had plenty of time to innovate and they’ve really dropped the ball (sorry Vista, I may try you via Virtualization).
Apple has done a great job at keeping up with bugs while still introducing new features and keeping the users interested.
My biggest Apple complaints are still price (though they have come down quite a bit) and the hardware monopoly (come on the OS is running on x86 cores now). However, there are some advantages to the hardware monopoly such as the the system runs much more reliable due to them having to support less generic/random hardware.
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I like my ibook for web surfing…but that’s all. :)
I couldn’t live with the lack of applications available for the mac. Yah it has the major ones, but there are so many PC specific apps I need, I couldn’t live on a mac alone.
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Which apps?
For now, yes it is missing the ability to nativley run (in OSX) PC games and professional apps like Max, Maya, AutoCAD .
So far I’ve found through either virtualization, wine or bootcamp I can run everything I would miss. Only in extreme cases would I have to bootcamp into *real* XP (for 3DsMax or games I guess).
Benefits of the Intel processor!
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