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Moving to Mac

The trusty IBM thinkpad T41 I used to own is now ancient. After having served me relentlessly through college (4 unforgiving years) and 4 more after that, it’s now time to finally put her to rest. After years of having been a loyal right-clicka, I’ve succumb and made the move. Treating myself to the new 15″ Macbook pro (referred just as Mac for the rest of this post).

Without too much drama, my reasons for shifting to a Mac:

  • Superior build : Apple takes special care to see these babies are built with utmost care. Hardware is of the spank-me-silly quality.
  • Sound-Engineering/Sound-Recording: A Windows 7 powered laptop just doesn’t have the juice to function as a DAW without alarming amounts of lag and crashing. Every time I had to record for small gigs, I had to chug my whole freaking desktop. I’ve read Macbook Pros can handle this. This single reason was almost enough for me to make the change. Here’s another link.
  • Security: Owing to loyal fanboys and generally lesser hatred, Apple isn’t plagued with as many threats and virus attacks as the PC. Even Google seems to think so.
  • UX or User Experience Design: Apple is the undisputed king of UI. I accepted this even when I was loyal to my PC ways. These guys simply get it. When you’re a designer these things seem to suddenly matter a whole lot.
  • The Pros use a Mac: Check The Setup, a cool site that catalogues the setups which most pros/programmers/geeks/nerds etc. use. Almost all of them swear by their Macs. You can also check the links at the bottom of this post.

Basic Requirements for any new laptop purchase:

  • Mobile Workstation: I intend to travel a lot more in the future. I can no longer depend on a clunky desktop as a workstation. That being said, I need something powerful enough to handle my needs. The new 15inch Macbook pro seems like the perfect balance between portability and power.
  • Ports : The more the merrier, always. The cool thing is that the Mac has an in-built firewire port (think external sound-card support). This made up for the fact that it has only 2 usb ports (both USB 2.0 thankfully). Always make sure you have the RJ45 LAN port, and an external video port (like the new HDMI or the older VGA port). The Mac comes with a “Mini DisplayPort” that has appropriate convertors to all other forms.
  • Battery Life: No worries here. Macbook Pros advertise 8-9 hours. That is WAY WAY more than any laptop i have ever owned has given me.
  • Wifi: I wanted to make sure my new laptop has the latest protocol specification for Wifi (802.11n).
  • Decent Sound Card: Macs are said to have the best on-board soundcards.
  • Hard disk: I wanted to go for the new Solid State Drives (SSD Hardisks). They dramatically boost performance but unfortunately come with heavy price tags. Will wait for sometime and then upgrade. I hear it’s definitely worth it.

Intersting Mac Users and Stories

You just have to see this list to get converted:

July 6th, 2010