Last October I decided to take the plunge and switch to a MAC. I had already switched to an iPhone from Windows Mobile 2 years ago and was very happy with the experience. I’ve seen the “I’m a MAC, I’m a PC” commercials and read plenty of great stories about others making the switch, it was my time.
As a IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad user I can appreciate the simple and elegant look and feel of the Apple laptop. I decided to go with the 13.3″ Macbook Pro. After upgrading to a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive and 4GB of ram this thing screamed, it was a vast improvement over my Lenovo X61. The OS and software selection was unfortunately a different story.
I booted in to OS X for the first time and began to play around with the menus and interface. Every setting and control seemed to be out of place or difficult to find. I began by installing Office Mac 2008 and configuring my company Exchange account in Entourage. What was a simple process in PC Outlook resulted in many Google searches to find out what I was missing for MAC. Eventually Exchange was setup correctly and all email, calendar, and contacts began to sync. At this point I began telling myself “It’s not going to happen overnight, I will get used to this after some time”. The next two weeks I searched for MAC applications that would replace the old PC counterpart. I found Firefox to replace Internet Explorer, ZOC terminal to replace SecureCRT, and VM Ware Fusion to replace VM Ware Workstation, etc. For me performing a task on the MAC took twice as long as it did in Windows, my keyboard shortcuts didn’t function, the OS X console was nice but I missed the command window, and why do I have to enable right-click?
After all the frustration I found the best feature OS X had to offer, Boot Camp. Boot Camp allowed me to load Windows 7 Professional x64 natively on the Macbook. I shortly found myself booting into Windows 100% of the time. I found ReFit, which allowed me create a graphical boot menu and set Windows 7 as the default OS. Windows does have its problems on the MacBook, the touchpad and right click is a learning curve, the battery life is not as great as it was under OS X, and the laptop keyboard is missing common keys.
Don’t get me wrong I love this laptop, it’s durable, thin, lite, and has all the built in ports and options that I need. My choice to switch to MAC was a good one, once I discovered how well Windows ran on Apple hardware. I’m a PC, and Windows 7 was my idea!