Daily Archives: March 28, 2007


Is It Time For You to Move to a MAC?

I’m thinking of returning to the fold. How about your?
I was an Apple user from the days of the Apple II through the MAC SE era.
I loved them.
For a number of reasons we’ve been a Windows based family since about 1995 with varying degrees of happiness and unhappiness. I was thrilled when Apple announced their migration to Intel processors last year and, well, am about ready to make the change back/to a Mac along with a lot of other folks:

Because I made the switch recently, and did so publicly, I’ve gotten hundreds of messages from Computerworld readers (as well as readers of my personal newsletter, Scot’s Newsletter) informing me that they, too, switched to the Mac recently. Many are IT people. Some confess that they manage Windows users by day, and run Macs at home. Others tell me that they’ve switched in the office, and it’s no big deal. The all-but-universal experience is that the transition was much easier than expected, and that using the Mac has made switchers more productive.

I work in a large IT department (400 plus people) that supports both very traditional services and a lot of bleeding edge networking stuff. Centrally only Windows desktops are managed under contract. If you want a Mac you become self-supporting. When we had an all-staff meeting the other day Macs were mentioned several times and brought a spontaneous round of applause from about 20% of the audience.
I plan to join that 20% when the support contract runs out on my Dell laptop at the end of next month.
Yes, the MACs seem a bit expensive at first blush but certainly at the high end they are pretty competitive. Our home machines are do for an upgrade and assuming I’m happy with my experience at work we will likely again become an Apple family at home! It doesn’t hurt at all that it is now trivially easy to run Windows and windows programs on a Mac.

NB: I almost forgot to mention that our kids have already rejoined the Apple family…they graduated from the Sony Discman (remember them?) to Ipods.