Think Different

I am what you call "Apple-fanatic". I am in the "cult of Mac". I am one of those who'll spend hours arguing with you about what is better: a Mac or a PC.

My whole adventure with Apple started about 2.5 years ago. I was leaving for Iceland as an exchange student and I had to get a laptop to do my work when at home. Until then I was a "PC-fanatic". Not having used a Mac in my whole life, I was under the common impression that only artists would use a Mac, that it would be a pain in the a** to connect it to a network, that compatibility issues must be in the daily agenda etc. A friend of mine that had been somehow lured into the world of Macs introduced me to his iBook. It was a 12-inch G4 PowerPC running OS X Panther. The first thing that I thought when I saw it was "God it's beautiful". Just comparing the look and feel of a Mac running OS X to a PC running Windows XP (I've heard that this also applies to Vista, but I haven't seen the latest MS OS, so I'm not going to comment) makes you think how had you been using the Windows machine without injuring your eyes somehow.

I have to admit I was very skeptical at the beginning. "What about office?", "What about firefox?", "What about development?", "What about games?". The only question that wasn't completely satisfied by the answer it received was the last one. OS X has it's own version of Microsoft Office, OS X has the fastest browser called Safari, but firefox and Camino are also available. With the exception of .net, any major IDE has an OS X version plus OS X has XCode built-in. Games was an issue regarding Mac, but a number of the most popular games were being ported for OS X (mainly by Aspyr).

I have to admit I was feeling like gambling when I decided to buy my iBook. After using it for 2 years I was completely satisfied, except for the times when I wanted to play certain games and I found out that they were not ported for Mac.

2 months ago I bought my second laptop. My second Mac. A MacBook Pro. Now THIS is 100% satisfaction. Thanks to BootCamp, I have installed Windows. A move that when I completed felt like betraying my own beliefs. Now, a month later, I have all I could ever ask from a laptop:

1. Battery that lasts up to 5 hours (when working with OS X)
2. The most advanced OS (OS X)
3. The ability to boot with Windows and run that game/application that hasn't been yet ported for Mac

I could go into details (which I'd love to) and point out the advantages and disadvantages of having a Mac, but I'd lose my point: be flexible, think different. That's what matters