I bought myself a new laptop yesterday, a 17″ MacBook Pro. I was sick to death of Windows Vista. Yes, that’s right, it’s a dog, and everything good I’ve said about it in the past was simply due to an initial state of ignorance. After using it for the past 6 months, I couldn’t handle it any more.
What made it worse was that the HP laptop that I had purchased just a few days before I moved to Australia has been broken for the past 6 months, no fault of the laptop or the person I bought it from, but instead it was the fault of the tech in New Zealand that fixed another problem. He fixed that, but by the time I found out he’d stuffed up the keyboard, I was in Australia. And I’ve been living with it ever since.
And then a couple weeks ago I found out that the BIOS was stuffed, when nothing I could do would enable it to boot from CD, so I wasn’t able to reinstall Windows XP. After a great deal of frustration, I made a few decisions.
The position I’m in these days allows me to salary package, effectively making whatever I buy in this way 40% cheaper. I’ve done this with the car, and I decided to do it with a laptop. After thinking about for a while, I came to the conclusion that after 12 years of Windows computers, I’m over them (for home use, at least).
So I researched and thought and researched some more, and decided that I would definitely go for an Apple MacBook Pro. I wasn’t ready to do it yet, and was going to wait for another month or so, but then something happened on Friday that forced me to make a decision.
Apple haven’t been selling their supply of 15″ MacBook Pros. No one knows why, and Apple aren’t saying. So people who have bought a 15″ have been waiting for weeks, with no delivery in sight. This influenced me to go for a 17″ instead, which aren’t having the same supply problems. And then on Friday I discovered that the local store here were doing a special deal – buy a 15″ MacBook Pro and get a free upgrade to a 17″….
This was an offer too good to pass by, so after discussing it with Deidre I moved forward on obtaining it. I picked it up yesterday, and have pretty much been playing with it ever since.
It’s pretty cool, I have to say. Much smoother and faster than Windows, more user-friendly, and the best part – it doesn’t frackin’ crash on me!
The interface is taking a little getting used to, along with the different way of doing things, but it’s all good. Learning new things is fun, and this is certainly fun.
Interestingly, some of the best ways of doing things on a Mac are exactly the same as the best ways I was doing things on Windows. Same programs, same functionality, but different OS. The only thing I really don’t like is that there’s no Google Picasa support for the Mac, so I’m having to find another method of hosting photo albums and sharing them out.
Facebook seems to be working really well for that. You can have an unlimited number of albums, with up to 60 photos per album. No limits on the amount of storage space. I like that. A lot. Because working with photos is probably one of the most important things I do on the web.
Some questions for you…. Do you own a Mac of some kind? What are your favourite tools or software packages? Have you always been a Mac user, or are you a Windows convert? How long ago did you convert?
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