It’s been a week since I got my new MacBook Pro (directly from Palo Alto Apple Store, thanks to my closest friend). I must admit that I was quite anxious on the pertinence of such a choice, as I had never really tried the Macintosh platform before. Now, I just couldn’t be more happy about that.
Each time I face my laptop (well, that’s nearly always), I have a boyish feeling of rediscovering the world, but a powerful, stable, usable, fun and elegant world, a dream-like one (I’m not an Apple fan yet, or am I already?). I used to think that I’d finally lose some critical applications while switching. Well, till now this has proven false and probably the opposite is the case. While macs come nowadays with tons of available applications, there are also some killer apps that just are macs-only. The amazing Quicksilver, for example, enables you to do just anything on every program or utility by just hitting a few keystrokes, while the minimal Textmate is just how every developing application would like to be. And, if you still care about windows applications (I also did care till a few days before, for Office 2007, Matlab and Weka for example), the Parallels desktop application -which does run super smoothly- can help you change your mind; and it’s indeed awesome, at least. All these, combined with no viruses, no drivers needed at all (for installing printers, routers etc.), program installations that are just one copy-paste away, no need for an extended monitor (due to Dashboard and the miraculous Exposé features) and the best ever screen shipped on a laptop, make macs a rational choice, if not a must.
But, if you still consider macs’ prices as 30% more expensive from a Vista equivalent (is there any?), I can tell you this: I own an HP pavillion laptop, which I bought in Beijing about two and a half years ago. Since then, I was usually spending about 8 hours daily, on average, on my laptop (estimation based on the first quartile of observations). Let’s assume that I spent 1 minute per hour due to slow opening/shutting down/switching programs issues that are typical to windows -and this is a totally conservative estimate. Then I’ve spent about 120 hours on such issues during the last two and a half years. Let’s also say that the mac is about 500 euros more expensive. These two assumptions force me to say that the choice of buying a mac is the optimal one, provided that my working hour is of bigger value than 4.2euro/hour or 33 euro/day, and I do hope that this is the case…
After all, the transition to my new MacBook was quick and fine, I do feel super happy about my choice to switch and I will maybe return to assess this choice in about six months later, when my post-purchasing bias will be less strong.