Confessions of a PC Guy

OK, I'm going to come out of the closet here. To set the stage, first let me say that I make my living writing software for the web and for databases using mostly Microsoft technology. Not including the PCs we have for employees, we still have a PC for every person in the family (6) and then some extra laptop PCs laying around for company use. We have PCs in the closet and PCs running under desks -- It's like a LAN Party game dream house. Our 5 & 6 year old boys have a waiting list of boys who want to play at their house.. :)

So with all this PC testosterone flowing in the house, its really embarrassing to say, what I'm about to say. I really like the new Mac that a company bought for me to test some websites on. You see, we're doing some video conferencing type software development and it needs to run on a PC and a Mac. Normally we can just test websites on PC versions of the Firefox and Safari browsers, and that means it'll pretty much work the same on the Mac. But with video conferencing, we needed to be a little more rigorous in the testing.

So.. I felt a like I was soliciting a prostitute or buying drugs, but I bough a Mac. A little MacBook Pro. I felt sinful, and traitorous. I was betraying Bill. I felt like I should make a little brown book cover to hide it from my friends. I even had to spend a few hours on google to understand what I was looking for and where to buy it. Dell doesn't sell Macs, you see. Should I look for a pimp or a drug seller on the corner of some seedy alleyway to make my "offer"? Would one of my friends catch me? What if my family found out?

A little more on my PC background. I take a Texas approach on computers. Bigger is better. Whether that is more RAM, more harddrive space, a better video card. I'm a sucker for the upgrade. (Deanna won't let me go to the grocery store with her -- We always come out with way too much food.) I've got some of the physically biggest laptops that you can buy. Giant machines that would crush your legs after an hour if you even made it that far before they caught fire from the heat generated from them. We're talking Dual-SLI-Video cards that you can play 3D games on as if you were on a desktop. Machines that have a GOOD battery life of maybe 45 minutes. Their power bricks are literally brick size and weight.

So that's my laptop background. Never messed with "Sissy" laptops -- until now.

So here comes some embarrassing disclosures.

It came in a cool white box with a handle. Nice packaging. I've got an iPod, I knew that packaging is nice from Apple. I had buffered myself against this foreseen temptation. No problems.

To do a legitimate job on the testing, I'd actually have to USE the Mac a bit, to get oriented. I figured the main way to do that would be set up my email accounts on it and use it as a "short-trip-email/internet" laptop. That way I could learn my way around it and be able to help folks with Mac problems. Its hard to do that if you've never used one. Amazingly, that was easy to do and it actually felt pretty responsive in getting my 3 different IMAP email accounts set up and functional. I was embarrassed to find out that it actually felt a little BETTER than checking email on my PC. (It took about 5 hours to synchronize all my email folders, but that would have happened on any computer -- I've just got like 1 gb of email files.)

The first time I noticed I was lowering my well-calculated Mac-the-Prostitute defenses, was when I noticed that this little machine can sit on my lap without making me infertile. The heat it puts off is pretty minimal. I felt a little angry and embarrassed -- my PC laptops never did a lapdance for me and here was this little Mac-whore sitting there for hours...

There aren't even any fans -- I can sit using it with no noise. Wow. I'm used to multiple fans cranking at full speed, warming the room by 10 degrees and leaving scorch marks on the desk.

Second thing -- The track pad on the mac is freaking awesome. What the heck PC laptop manufactures?!? Have you used one of these? You've got to be embarrassed at how sucky the pc touchpads are? You really should be! And I didn't even know what I was missing. Dang. The mac-touchpad is huge, smooth and the two finger scroll / two finger right click are amazing. It took me about a day to get used to it, but now its ruined me for using a PC laptop touchpad. I feel like I did when I ate my first real Steak at Great American Land and Cattle Co on Alabama (El Paso, TX). All the rest of the leathery meat slabs I had eaten in my life were now left naked for what shallow imitations they were for real "Steak". Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel using my pc laptop touchpads now. It hurts.

Lid-closes-sleep-mode. First thing I usually do on a PC laptop is to turn off the "Sleep-mode-when-you-close-the-lid" mode. It just doesn't ever seem to work right -- It always freezes up some poor application that wasn't designed right. I have tons of PC applications, and its easier to just shut them down, then turn off the laptop manually. Then you don't have to battle some poor app that won't come back "awake" when I lift the lid again, or try to get a network connection back, or try to get my email program to respond, etc... -- I couldn't believe it, but the Mac version of this close-the-lid-sleep function actually works. And it works really fast. And all the software seems to be fine with "Being woken back up". The network just jumps back on. So I don't think I even know HOW to turn off the mac, but that's fine. It just works.

Now will I be throwing out the 10+ pcs in my house? No. I still need them because they run the majority of the software that I need to run my programming business. And they also run the 100+ games that my family loves to play. And they seem to cost 25~50% of what the Mac machines of similar caliber cost. And I know how to build them, replace their parts, diagnose them from the ground up if necessary. (And I assume all machines on earth break down eventually, even cool little silver ones with no fans and big/smooth track pads.)

Did I mention battery life? Granted nothing I have is a fair comparison, but still, I got like 6 hours of email work straight out of the Mac. This is unheard of on my PC laptops. Though I could probably get similar battery life on a PC laptop if I didn't always buy such power hungry monsters with big 17" screens. I just can't help it. (See the "Sucker-for-upgrades" comment above.)

With all that said, I feel a little like I've stepped out of the confessional. I've come out of the closet. I'm ready for the ridicule. I've been tempted, if not turned, to the "darkside". I can say it now I think... "macs are pretty cool."

Which laptop will I bring with me on little day trips? It'll probably be the cool little silver one with the bitten-apple on its cover. It's appropriate for my sinfulness feeling, but sometimes its good to be a little bad...