Switcher: How I went from using Macs to Vista

Hello, my name is Aaron.  And I’m a PC user.

It feels a little dirty, to be honest.  Yet, somehow, freeing to admit it.  Its one of those things in life that just ort of creeps up on you, and you don’t realize what’s happened until it’s too late.

 I used to be a video producer by trade.  This meant, in the early 2000s, I had no choice but to shout from the rooftops the beauty and elegance of Mac OSX.  Final Cut Pro was the the be all and end all of video editing.  Motion was the quickest program to use.  There was no question; for media creation there is no better suite of tools than the Mac ecosystem.

 But then I got a new job, fresh with benefits and decent pay.  And no longer did I need to create little movies and what not.  And on my desk at work was the boring, cold screen of Windows.  Ah, but at least I had my PowerBook, iMac and Mac desktop at home.  I would never go back to Mac.

Then I found programming.

Everyone around me said, “Use Eclipse.”  But I strayed, I was tempted by the darkside, and I loaded Visual Studio C# Express on my wife’s old laptop.  That was almost a year ago.

Slowly, I began taking her clunky old laptop tp work with me to work on programming during work.  And then XNA came out… the old rusty Windows laptop even came with us on vacation.  I felt like I was cheating on my shiny PowerBook… I mean, the PC was under-powered, had hard drive troubles and was foreer slow.  But Microsoft had seduced me with their tools, great support, and strong community.  I tried to use the PowerBook… I installed Eclipse on it.  But I kept using the laptop instead.

I went to the Vista launch party.  I saw.  And maybe, just maybe, a small part of me said, “Wow.”

Seriously people, I’m a Mac user.  I still have my Mac desktop to do my video editing on.  I still have my PowerBook.  There’s an Apple sticker on my car’s rear window.  I have lead many converts to the ease of use and quality that is Mac products.

But.

(I feel so dirty.)

Vista looks better than Mac OSX.  It runs faster and smoother.  To be honest, I’ve never had a machine render webpages so quickly.  Office 2007 loads in about 3 seconds on my machine.  Yes – my machine.  On launch day, on January 30th I bought myself a new HP laptop (I bought my wife a Sony one, too).  I bought myself a $750 laptop and it runs better than my $1600 PowerBook ever did.  I’m not making this up, seriously.

Microsoft has a great product on their hands with Vista.  For years and years they’ve been teasing us with ideas of convergence; we’re on the cusp of it.  Apple has awakened the sleeping giant that is Microsoft, and their hidden weapons seem to be ready.  Vista, the 360, Windows Home Sever, Live Services…

I am now more than ever interested to see what Mac OSX 10.5 is going to look like.  They have their work cut out for them to best Vista.  I haven’t abandoned OSX.  I just have moved beyond simple fanboy-ism and realized that there are different tools to get different jobs done.  When I want to create media, I will always use a Mac.  When I want to program, I wil probably always use a Windows machine.

Congratualtions Microsoft; you brought a prodigal son home. 

Vista Launch Party in Nashville

That’s right; in a show of complete geekiness, Le Chocolate Moose and I headed out to Cool Springs, TN for the Official Nashville Vista Launch.

I must say that Microsoft put a pretty good step forward for the “party,” and had the appropriate festiveness for the number of people there (maybe 100 non-MS or Circuit City employees).  There, unfortunately, wasn’t a whole lot to do.  More importantly, Circuit City didn’t have a whole lot of laptops.

You see, I haven’t been able to do hardly any coding the last few weeks because the only PC (we’ve been a Mac househould… that looks to be changing due to Vista) we have in the house is an old laptop that’s dying; I think there’s actual physical damage to one of the hard drive’s platters.  So I’ve been holding out to buy a Vista laptop.  Well, Circuit City
had abot 5 laptops with Vista for sale (ok, maybe 7).  So no new laptop for me yet; any suggestions?

So there wasn’t too much to do at the party, except free food (suprisingly good hamburgers and hot dogs), a pretty good DJ, and meeting some guy from the Titans (though I thought the older gentlemen who was “guarding” the Titans guy was much more amusing and charismatic).  The Titans guy was humorous in that he kept watching the highlight reel of himself instead of talking to people.  We got out picture with him; if I can get it scanned in I’ll post it here.

Oh, and I found out Microsoft has a small Nashville campus.  Who knew?

All in all, it was a decent event.   Microsoft put an appropriate amount of attention into the launch here.  I wish there were more community events like this, though.  So I hope to join the Vista Movement soon; Microsoft, here’s a guy WANTING to move away from Mac and towards your products.  Push your partners to get out some good laptops for me to buy!