Back in my college days I was a Mac guy. My first computer was a floppy-swapping Mac Plus. After about a year, I saved up the dough to get a SCSI hard disk — a 20 megabyte behemoth. This hard drive unit was as big as a toaster and had more space than I’d ever need.
Those halcyon days soon ended and into the cube mines I went. I got my first PC and then second and fifteen years later, I could hardly remember the joy of computing. I’ve had mixed luck in the past few years. My last Dell desktop purchased in 2001 still purrs under my desk in the basement, it’s P4 1.7Ghz heart lumbering away day and night much longer than I ever anticipated. I’ve been through 4 laptops since then. All but the most recent ones have been failures in some respect.
When Apple made the move to the Intel chipsets, it was time to do some investigating. I fell in love with the MacBook Pro the first time I saw it. I’d coveted my colleague’s Mac Laptop for years. I’d watched it fall off of desks, go sliding across parking lots, and still keep working.
In contrast my Windows laptops couldn’t even handle the simplest tasks of knowing what to do when I closed and opened the cover. The time had come and the money was available. I got a bit of a pre-birthday surprise as I started working the other night. A glistening 2.33Ghz MacBook Pro was waiting for me. El Numero Uno. The top of the heap.
It’s been a blast. If I wasn’t a .NET developer, I’d probably never go back, but alas I must. My Dell will still get a workout in the office, but with the addition of Parallels I can now (and have been all evening) use Visual Studio inside Windows XP INSIDE OS X. It’s a beautiful compromise and will allow me to get the most out of this fantastically executed and beautifully designed machine.