Pete's Eats

I’m a fairly die-hard Mac user. Well, I used to be. Sheez, this is going to be hard…

I ‘returned’ to Mac when they launched the blue G3 tower in the late 90′s. I worked in a medium sized web design shop and had to work hard to remain the only Mac user in the place. I faced constant grief all the time. OS8 and OS9 were fairly hard to defend to be honest. Then came the titanium G4 laptops and the grief sort of quietened down a bit. OSX hadn’t shipped at this point and life wasn’t great with OS9 and matters only got worse when X did ship and we all had to run dual boot machines for a few years to make sure we could keep using our fave apps. A highlight was standing on stage in Amsterdam at Flash Forward, in front of about 700 people and having Director crash my TiBook three times in a row (with having to boot TWO os’s after each crash)…

But it didn’t matter, OSX was amazing. Looking back at the early versions now, they’re crazily dated in appearance, but it was still the best OS by far back then. To cut to the chase, I was hooked on Mac’s and never thought I could ever go back to a PC.

For my work now, I have both a PC laptop and a Mac laptop and I’ve tried very hard to keep using my Mac as my main machine. It can be tough at times but overall it’s entirely possible with the advent of modern VM applications. But even prior to taking on this role, and this bit is key so pay attention, I began to question if my Mac was still the OS I fell in love with. I wasn’t sure. The OS began to feel heavy and a bit clunky, the amazing little gems of usability that even long-term users had never seen or noticed became fewer with every point release, elements of the UI actually started to get quite annoying and the whole thing began to suffer from some pretty bad bloat. I haven’t yet come across someone who’s upgraded to the latest version and not suffered some pretty horrendous experiences either. I have a full copy sat here and I’m too concerned about installing it because I might end up being screwed over somehow.

I started using Vista with my main work machine and at first, I just didn’t get on with it at all. I’m certain I was putting up some impossible barriers but even so, it just wasn’t a Mac, was it? In the past few months I’ve used Vista on a PC laptop almost exclusively (thanks to a guy with a big arse and belly full of g&t’s who sat on my Mac mid-flight – and no, I’m not talking about myself!) and it has seriously grown on me.

I’m not going to go on about it here too much because I’ll just get accused of company bs so let’s cut to the chase (again, but for real this time)… I needed to buy a new laptop this week and went to go get myself a Macbook Air. They are seriously lush but the spec is way too low. I can be a gadget freak of the highest order but not even I can justify having a machine for those moments when carrying your main machine around is too much like hard work! The Macbook was looking pretty dated too compared to the Air. So, I went to look at the PC laptops. I wanted something light but useful and didn’t expect to find it in a PC to be honest. But I did, and then some. So I ended up with my first personal Windows based machine since about 1998.

Went to buy a Mac, came back with a PC. I’m still surprised myself, and wouldn’t have put money on this outcome, but there you have it.

Vista is pretty good to work with, the hardware (a little HP Pav tablet pc) is great and the available software is liberating. Anyway, I can assure you I haven’t been drinking any coolaid. This is a purely personal choice based on a good knowledge of both systems. But still, bugger me! I’m a PC! (sort of).