So as I might have mentioned, my intention was to write the inaugural post for LukeOnTech about my experience switching to the Mac. Unfortunately, having sat down to write it, its a monster, and is way larger than would ever make sense for a single post. So instead, I’m thinking now that it will become a series of posts over a period of time, so, here is the first one, which is going to focus on why I chose to get a new laptop, and why that laptop had to be a Mac.
For Christmas 2005, I got a shiny new Dell laptop. For the people who want the numbers, its an Inspiron 6000, it has a 1.86ghz Centrino, 1gig of RAM and an ATI X300 graphics card. As far as 18month old laptops go, it certainly doesn’t suck that hard on paper. In the real world however, its not that great. Firstly, and most importantly it weighs around 3.4kg, which certainly isn’t that bad, but its not an inconsiderable amount either – it certainly isn’t the kind of gadget that you can carry around just in case you want it. Another major factor in its suckage is the graphics card. Now the X300 is not a particularly bad card for a laptop, even today, but the problem I found was that ATI released revision after revision of their Catalyst driver suite. Dell didn’t. And because of the way the card has been integrated into the mainboard and display, you need for the manufacturer to supply them – even trying to force the issue using the ATI reference set, and the result is a hollow laugh and a dialogue box explaining that you don’t have any compatible hardware, and that you should have read their website more carefully. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be that big a deal, but ATI have been tweaking things, and increasingly game manufacturers expect you to have drivers that are more current than September ‘05 (when Dell last released them), and the games bitch and moan if you don’t have the drivers, and run really poorly if you carry on anyhow. Thirdly, after 18 months of almost constant use, its getting very tired and bits are starting to break. Last month I had to get the hinge replaced on it because it had snapped from a combination of constant opening and closing and a really really bad design from any sort of engineering point of view – £90. A few days later, I was informed that my battery was nearing the end of its usable life, and although it would continue to work, don’t expect to get good usage from it (it had dropped from around 2.5hrs to more like 50 minutes), the cost to replace? Another £100. The keys on the keyboard have been wearing smooth for a while, and there are to palm impressions where I wrest my hands whilst typing. Then, after I started experiencing really poor performance in some games that had previously worked fine, I investigated the processor a bit to find that the intelligently speed-stepped system designed to conserve power wasn’t allowing me to get speed over about 1.4Ghz at a very maximum, wasting nearly 500Mhz of my processor. It was time for a new machine.
For a while now, I’ve been fancying Mac. It all started when I started using iTunes properly for purchasing, podcasts and organising my music. It probably helps that I have an iPod too. As you might know, I’ve been involved in producing two different podcast projects as well, and all the time I was hearing about GarageBand and how great it was for recording the necessary audio. The switch to Intel processors meant I understood the speed of the systems I was looking at and could actually make a comparison – it also meant that in a pinch, I could swap to Windows via Parallels or BootCamp to do whatever I needed to do. Finally, they’re nice looking. Black plastic looking laptops look horrible. My Dell was grey and white, and was certainly better than anything I’d had previously from an aesthetic point of view, but it wasn’t a Mac, it wasn’t ultra-shiny, it wasn’t pure white, and it just didn’t look good. Also, Macs had been getting rave reviews from the people I knew who had switched (from both Windows and Linux), so all in all, it seemed like a sensible choice.
So that’s why I wanted to Switch. I was going to run a couple of sections together, but just talking about what motivated me to do it ran on for so long that I’ll leave it there for this post. The next post in the series is going to talk about my experience ordering my MacBook, so there’s going to be some talk about what was good, what was bad, and how Apple could improve their setup no end. It is largely written already, but I want to cover some other things as well, rather than make this just about Macs, so expect that next week some time.