Biting Into The Forbidden Fruit
Hi, I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC. Well, now I’m both. Here’s the deal.
I’ve been a Windows guy since kindly Uncle Bill first set out his application by floppy diskette. It sucked, then it got better, buggier, worse, better, plugged, leaked, round and round and round.
Truth be known, I liked Windows. I still do, in fact. I know my way around the registry, I can poke things and know what’s going to happen. It’s my operating system.
That last sentence bears explanation. Some time ago I was listening to Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles. Dave started talking about the Uplifter movement, which is a philosophy that espouses control over one’s environment. There’s a lot to it, but one precept is that if you can’t take apart a piece of machinery then it isn’t yours - you’re merely renting it. I have lived by that idea for my entire adult life, but never before had a name for it.
So Windows was my system. I owned it. I could rip it up, put it back together again, fix problems and work around impossible situations. I didn’t mind the blue screen of death, I looked forward to it in a perverse way.
I’d been looking at a MacBook Pro for awhile but when my laptop died I went directly to Dell’s site for a new one. Dependable, homey and compatible with whatever was on my desk, a Windows XP machine was for me. Sadly, it was not to be.
Dell could configure a machine with XP for me, but it would take nearly two weeks to ship. I didn’t have that kind of time, so off I went to J&R to see what I could see. I was greeted with row upon row of beautiful laptops, all smiling back at me . . . and loaded with Vista.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m sure Vista will be a great operating system someday. I’m sure it will purr like a kitten, crashing seldom and making millions of people happy and productive. But that time has not yet come. I’ve heard horror stories of people who “upgraded” to Vista only to end up with a buggy computer that crashed regularly and didn’t play well with existing peripherals. Sorry, that’s not my idea of fun.
So I went up to the fifth floor where the Apple Store beckoned. Most of J&R was a loud mess of machines and people, but upstairs it was cool and quiet. An iPod played a soothing tune in the background, and the sunlight shone on the majestic machines that I had been assured “just worked.”
A lone MacBook Pro 15.4″ machine sat on a display stand, open for the world to see. The screen, the casing, the promise of a worry-free computing life was a siren song. But wait! Apple is a closed system built on an open-source Linux kernel! Download Ubuntu or another Linux distro and be done with it! Don’t flee the arms of one megalomaniac for another! Resist temptation!
I backed away, went home and pondered. After all, this was a life-altering move for me. Leaving behind all that I’d known for uncharted territories, moving from a system that had enormous third-party support to one that relied overwhelmingly on its hardware developer for applications . . . it all seemed so foreign.
The next morning I was at J&R when it opened, money in hand. Twenty minutes later I was back on the train, now clutching my new MacBook Pro.
So is the MacBook Pro the forbidden fruit? The savior? Just a sexy body? Marketing hype?
Will I turn into one of those crazy Macheads who deride Windows-based machines? Will I make pilgrimage to Cupertino? Will I put this shiny new box on eBay next week and go back to the open arms of Bill Gates?
Stay tuned.
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