My third attempt to become a Mac user in the last decade is now in full swing, and it appears I've finally done it. As promised, here's the story.
After 12 years of Linux exclusivity, I had a hardware failure and was stressing about researching new hardware. After 12 years of it, I've lost enthusiasm for dicking around trying to get simple shit working. Stuff like: my Wacom tablet, one shared desktop across two monitors, a Wacom tablet and shared desktop across two monitors concurrently, etc. It was at this point that D suggested just buying a PC from Costco, pre-assembled, pre-driver-sorted, and running an OS that might be slightly less likely to break itself every time there's an update. (Slightly.)
So I took the plunge and got a machine running Windows 7. Because so many of the applications I use are either webapps or open source, literally every application I needed to be productive was available to me on Windows 7 without any hassle. Ok, without too much hassle. OK, so it was a hassle. I had to get cygwin installed to make working in a terminal window useful, and then a whole host of things needed installed and configured to make my development environments semi-compatible so I didn't rip out all of my hair trying to adjust.
There was some minor pain, but every time I'd clicked the update button in Ubuntu at new release time I'd experienced more. So I felt pretty good about it.
Then one day, I needed to set up a Mac mini in the office to work on automating some aspects of our iPhone build system. It was like heaven. It already had all the unix tools I needed, making a hack like cygwin unnecessary. I didn't need to do anything to make it work like I expected. I made a mental note of this.
A few months later, the hard drive in my Dell laptop started having issues, which exacerbated some of my Windows 7 problems, resulting in me spending inordinate amounts of time rebooting and trying to get stuff working instead of just working. I got fed up and plugged my mouse, keyboard and monitor into the nearby Mac mini and spent the next couple days happily working with no issues whatsoever.
Then, on Black Friday, D and I ventured to the Apple Store, where I put aside years of anti-Apple sentiment and dropped way too much money on a 13" Macbook Pro.
This time, the switch was even easier. Sure, all my webapps and open source applications were available like they were on Windows 7, but now the operating system actually worked like I expected as well. Plus when I opened the lid it would instantly be usuable, which was a huge improvement over Windows 7.
Now, after several months, I've almost completely adjusted, and have never been happier with a computer. (Save maybe for the Google CR-48 ChromeOS laptop that I'm using to compose this blog post... but that's another story altogether. ) I'm sure I won't feel the same way when an OS upgrade is going to cost me $100 and cause a bunch of upgrade pains, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
