Switching Sides
Late last week, I did the unthinkable. I ordered a new laptop…from Apple.
I’ve been watching the MacBook Pro line closely lately, especially since Apple introduced the new unibody design, and I’ve been really impressed with what I’ve seen. In addition, OS X seems to be maturing to the point that nearly anything you can do on a Windows machine is do-able on a Mac. Worst case, you can install Parallels Desktop for Mac or VirtualBox and run a virtual Windows machine for those things that are Windows-specific.
The tipping point for me came with fast enough dual-core processors and sufficient memory to make running a virtual Windows box a reasonable proposition. Until about a year ago, it simply didn’t make sense.
Anyway, the stars aligned, and I finally decided to give the Mac a shot.
The new machine is a 15″ MacBook Pro, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, 320GB SATA HDD, with dual video cards and 512MB of dedicated video ram for the discrete video processor. That’s a heck of a lot of hardware.
I actually went with a refurb rather than new – saving about $400 in the process. My experience with refurbs has been excellent from Dell. Let’s hope Apple continues the trend.
So now my big challenge is to start the process of identifying Mac replacements for common software I use. I’ll try to keep you up to date on how the switch works out, and my impressions as I wade into this new world. Wish me luck.
