The Switch
After dabbling in the Mac world for the past couple of years, I decided last week to really make the switch. For a long time now, I’ve been building my own PCs — lovingly assembled from well-researched, hand-picked components and upgraded on a fairly regular basis. These machines always served me well, but over the past couple of years I’ve found that my computing needs have changed and it’s no longer obvious that a PC was the best fit for me:
- There was a time when my PC was mainly a game machine. One of the reasons that I built my own systems was so that I could have complete control over things like the type of memory or graphics card that was installed — always in pursuit of the best experience for the latest games. Now, as a father of two young kids, I find that I have almost no time to play games (I’ve got a copy of Far Cry 2 sitting here that I’ve played for about 10 minutes).
- I’m far less dependent on desktop applications than I used to be. It used to be that I was a slave to Microsoft Outlook for my email and calendar. Now I’ve got Google hosting all this stuff for me and the particular operating system I’m running is a lot less important. It’s hard to believe, but I haven’t had any of the Microsoft Office applications installed on my machine in about a year now and haven’t once missed them.
- The desktop applications that I do still use are tools for managing my photos and editing video. After playing with programs like iPhoto, Aperture and iMovie on my wife’s MacBook, I found that these were the programs I was drawn to whenever I needed to do photo or video work. The equivalent offerings on the PC side are pretty weak in comparison.
So, with fewer things tying me to the PC and lots of things calling to me from the Mac it seemed clear that a switch was in order. I also got the feeling that my wife was becoming a little annoyed with the amount of time I was spending on her computer (especially considering there are a number of other machines in the house). In an effort to avoid any domestic disturbances, I ordered myself one of the new Mac minis.
I’ve been using the mini for about 5 days now and absolutely love it. There have been a few pain points (which I’ll save for a subsequent post) but, for the most part, it’s been a smooth transition.
Of course, I have no intention of abandoning my PC roots (I pretty much have to use a PC for work), but I am looking forward to immersing myself in the Mac ecosystem and having a whole new set of tools at my disposal. More to come.
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