My First Venture Into The World Of Macs

I’ve been purely a Windows user for the last 15 years but back in January I started to think about maybe purchasing a Mac to see what they were like. This was round about the time I started using my iPhone as my main device, and how well MobileMe worked with it.

Two weeks ago I decided to do it and purchased a white MacBook, I would have liked one of the new aluminum ones but couldn’t justify spending an extra £200 on something that I might not like. So off I went to the Apple Store in the Trafford Centre, Manchester, spent 15 minutes talking to a very helpful guy there who talked me through some of the pre-installed software and had a demo on one of the in store MacBook. I did mention that I had also been considering the 13” aluminum model. As soon as I said it I thought “you idiot, now I’m gonna get the hard sell to go for the more expensive once and I’ll have to listen to why it’s so much better”. I waited and waited but it didn’t happen. He did briefly mention the differences between the two, but never tried to get me to spend more money than I had planned to do. This was a nice refreshing change from if I had been shopping in PC World or Curries where I would have had to listen them talking shit to try and get me to buy what they wanted me to have.

I’ve had the MacBook now for 2 weeks and I love it, I wish I had bought one a few years ago. I had been concerned that some of my hardware might not work with it. A few things haven’t such as TV Tuner and Nokia Digital Pen but I never expected those to work because of the software they use, everything else has worked fine, including the Sony Reader which I didn’t thin would work with DRM’d books but it does.

The bundled software beats anything I’ve previously had out of the box on a Windows machine, iLife 09 is a fantastic suite of applications. One of the things I was pleased with when I first turned it on was no crapware. It was so pleasant to just turn it on and be greeted with a nice blank desktop. Nothing like when I’ve bought Windows laptops in the past, when I turn them on for the first time my initial thought it “OMG how much crap is on here, its going to take me ages to delete it all, and even then the registry will still be left full of crap, fuck it, it would be quicker to wipe it clean and do a fresh install of Windows.”

I haven’t found anything that I can’t do on the Mac that I did with Windows, all my frequently used programs either have a Mac version or I’ve found an alternative. Other than when I’m at work I have hardly touched a Windows PC in the last 2 weeks and I’m not missing their clunky interface and slow shutdown speeds at all.