So its finally happened, I finally turned against my Christian up bring and University Education … I took a massive man made (I like to think hand crafted) slab of brushed aluminium and stabbed it right in to my old friend Bill Gates back.

Thats right boys and girls I’ve turned to the dark polo neck jumper side and bought a macbook pro. Like the preverbal lamb I have joined the increasing number of XP generation techies turning to Mac since the intel revolution at Cupertino.

So what’s happened to make us switch?

Well to be honest i’m not sure any one thing has. But an alarmingly increasing number of the 20 something computer friendly ‘techies’ are switching like my self. What should be alarming you if your reading this and don’t consider your self a techie is where will I go for my free tech support. Think about this for a second. If all those useful friends who you call on in those desperate hours of need when windows eats that file you’ve been working on for days or when windows just plain old refuses to boot don’t use windows as their main operating system anymore they will

A. Be less likely to have accumulated the necessary knowledge from there own experiences to fix your problem and

B. Be less likely to want to help you out as there working knowledge or your system will be decreased by infrequent use.

So your thinking so what I know ten guy who all work in I.T. and at least one of them will still be using a PC i’ll just ask them instead. But bear in mind that person will already be suppling free support to his 10-15 immediate friends and family and now he has to help my 10, and the other six or so techies 10 dependents suddenly the one person is now supporting 70 peoples I.T. problems without reward. All the while all his techie friends are telling him “Mac’s are great, they always work you should really consider switching, I haven’t looked back since.” Worried Yet? I’m a self confessed techie and I am.

So back to the point of this post.. Why did I switch, well

• Performance: PC World – “The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac”
  

  Propaganda – Windows is slower or not as good as OSX
  Truth – As PC World rightly point out Windows Vista runs really really well on mac’s too. The fact the every body often forgets is that apple inc. are, always have been and still insist they are a Hardware manufacture, that makes there actual competition Dell, Sony and HP. I have both OSX and Vista on this macbook pro and I can honestly say that running vista it blows away any other hardware i’ve seen yet.

• Usability, I have been using mac’s at work occasionally for a while now and everything does seem well thought out and natural.
  

  Now don’t get me wrong I think Vista has taken a beading it didn’t really deserve, “Biggest let down of 2007” a bit harsh, how quickly people forget how bad OSX 10.0 was so bad in fact it was almost un usable until the speedily released 10.1 . Having said that after using Mac almost exclusively for a two or three weeks now it does make life a lot easier at a price, Mac’s are almost completely idiot proof and although lurking underneath the hood is a industry thoroughbred Linux, OSX is missing a lot of the advance configurations of Windows. All the functionality is their, more even but doing anything other that the Cupertino average user tasks requires a much great knowledge base. Mirroring Apples product range of casual user and pro user products you need to be a linux sys admin to do some things on a mac that are fairly trivial task in windows. Still from the win XP techie point of view, I get the best of both worlds, that is all the power of the Linux command line and open source application whilst keeping, nay upgrading my graphical user interfaces with gentle gradients and transparencies.

to be continued…