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.

Posted by Steve on March 28, 2007
Comments

When it comes to the point where I can no longer run my apps without upgrading to Vista, I will replace all our Windows PCs with Macs.

Posted by Allan at March 28, 2007 8:28 PM

We never moved away from the MAC. I have an IMac and a 12-inch IBook. They're clearly superior machines. Also, Aloysius likes the fact that OS X is named after big cats. We also want to get Apple TV some day.

Posted by amanuensis at March 29, 2007 10:52 AM

It would take a lot to get me to switch back to a PC. I've been a Mac-user for only a year, and it's just SO much easier.

If Mac would just get together with Google and form a joint venture, they could literally DESTROY Microsoft. It would take a while, but if they don't do it...someone will.

Can't wait.

Posted by logipundit at March 30, 2007 12:58 PM

We are an all-mac family (between the three of us, we have three laptops and a macmini) and it's quite the relief. Back when my daughter was required to have a windows laptop by her school, we spent hours on maintenance and troubleshooting issues. Since we finally got out from under the gloom and doom of Micro$oft, we've been carefree (well, except for when I dumped a beer into my powerbook, but it DID eventually recover)!

Congrats on your move to a more elegant, dependable world...

Posted by alice at April 4, 2007 1:42 PM
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