I used to be a Mac person back in the early to mid-’90s, starting with the old Mac Plus. That changed in 1996 when I joined Microsoft (for 20 months of full body immersion), where Macs were seen as somewhat alien and software programs were not yet compatible across platforms.
I’ve bought a G4 desktop and Powerbook and MacBook Pro laptops since then, but I’ve remained cross-platform, buying a Dell Dimension and Sony Vaio desktop for my day-to-day work since 2000.
Today, however, I’ve gone back to an all-Macintosh home business. The government’s economic stimulus rebate check arrived today, and by this afternoon it was in the coffers of Steve Jobs — I ponied up for a Mac Pro desktop.
Haven’t set it up yet, but it looks pretty sweet: Two quad-core processors (8-core) of 2.8GHz along with a 325GB HD and a separate internal 500GB Western Digital Green Power hard drive. I do a lot of video, and I like the Mac Pro’s expandable upgrade path. (There’s an alarm system on the house, so don’t try anything, buster.)
So long, PC-land
One reason for the switch: I’m sick to death of not being in control of my personal computer experience. I’ve been plagued by PC registry problems lately, and can’t find my Windows XP install disk so I can do a clean reinstall (and I just won’t buy it again, thank you). Every time I boot up my PC I get:
• A “Windows Explorer has encountered a problem” dialog box
• A Dr. Watson Postmortem dialog box problem.
• An NEC Display solutions Spectra View II popup that won’t go away
• A Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error! dialog box
• A Uniblue Registry Booster offering to fix the 60 or so problems with my Registry (somehow, despite the fixes, it never gets fixed)
I’ll miss a few things about the PC (mostly the cool little programs that are written just for the PC), but not much. So, I’m now an official Machead 24/7. Some day I’ll pony up for a Windows XP disk so I can run Windows programs on Leopard OS 10.5. But not for a while. I want to see what an all-Mac experience is like.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Hey JD…I got my first PC in 1990. It was an HP 386 -20 mhz and it ran on DOS. I wanted a Mac, but couldn’t afford it. (Trivia: I signed up for Prodigy when I got it).
In ’97 I got a PC laptop with Windows. It so sucked.
In ’99 I got a Mac and I never looked back.
FWIW, my first PC was a champ. I had it for 12 years albeit the last 5 years I only did word processing on it. I was sad to let it go.
Anyway…I didn’t mean to trip down memory lane. I just wanted to ask you: did you see the Apple II at Maker Faire? The one with a dual floppy drive and a cassette drive? That was a trip!
Uh-oh. Another one of these posts. I get the feeling I’m not going to be able to hold out much longer. This may very well be my last PC. But I’m scared – my Vaio XP laptop has been chugging along without any problems since I got it many many moons ago. And I’ve seen a lot of scary things happening with Mac laptops. What to do?
I saw an Apple II not at Maker Faire but at a computer museum in Silicon Valley a coupl e of years ago. Yeah, it was a trip …
Chris, you shouldn’t move to a Mac unless you feel the need to, especially if things are going well on your Vaio laptop. You’re still in the majority … for now. :~)