My conversion to the world of Apple

If you had met me a few years back, you would never have believed that I would even consider an Apple product.

Well, finally, I have made the plunge. And I am here to tell you that the water is actually quite warm, and not as scary as you might think. And the more that I work and play in the world of Apple products, the more I realize how significant this decision has become.

A little background: until a little over a year ago, I had several MS Windows machines and a couple of Linux boxes. My work laptop was an IBM Thinkpad - which was actually a fantastic machine in it's own right. I firmly believed, along with the Windows masses, that if it was not happening in the PC world, it was not immediately relevant. And this generally made sense. The latest "in" software was usually written for Windows, the latest games were written for Windows first, and the files that I exchanged with my colleagues and customers at work were authored in Microsoft Office for Windows.

Unfortunately, it also meant that the majority of hacker and virus activity also happens in the Windows world. And this was fine for me for a while, until one fateful day when I picked up a virus on our main PC that just refused to go away. As I scrambled to try to rescue a number of important files, including family pictures and personal records (unsuccessfully, I might add), I stumbled across some of the claims made by Mac users and how happy they were with their simple to use and as yet uninfected Mac OS X systems.



I am not new to the world of Macintosh. Those who have known me for a while will remember back when I worked for Xerox Canada. Back then I believe it was Mac OS 7. Macs were used extensively in the graphics industry, as they were the primary tool for graphics designers. Much of the software used in the graphics industry used to be available only for Apple machines, so if you worked in the industry you usually had a lot of exposure to Apple products. This was back in the age of Extensions and Control Panels, when Mac users occassionally suffered with technical issues like hard drive drivers and Extension conflicts that would cause random crashes when you least expected it. And multitasking in Mac OS was absolutely terrible. In many instances outside of the graphics arts industry, Macs were treated more as toys than as real computers.

Fortunately for all of us, Steve Jobs and Mac OS X changed all of that. And for me, the discovery of Mac OS X Tiger was the end of MS Windows on both my home and work machines. I sold our home PCs, or relegated them to the basement as fileservers (see FreeNAS). And at work, I managed to get my laptop changed to an iBook.

I haven't looked back since. All of the applications that I used to have on my Windows PC were either available on my Mac, or have even better equivalents. I am now using devices and software that was designed to be easy to use, instead of requiring a significant amount of time and effort for me to learn how the developer wanted me to work.

And I have not lost a single document yet. Knock on wood!