Thursday, June 29, 2006

I came. I tried. And decided to take a pass.

Last year, I was in the market for a new laptop. I did my research and grilled people in the know to get their opinions on systems, brands, and the tiny details. Thegameiam tried his best to convince me to try a Mac. After listing out the pros and cons, I decided to give it a shot-- why not? Most of the arguments I heard against a Mac in general stemmed from the seeming lack of good gaming, but I'm not a gamer, so who cares? It could do everything that I wanted it for, so I thought, why not take this chance to see what all the fuss is about and maybe even learn something new in the process?

My iBook arrived after a few days, and at first, I loved it. It was sleek and efficient, and it was different. The excitement lasted for a few months.

But after a while, I started to get annoyed. Safari (Mac's internet browser) didn't work well with Yahoo mail features that I used all the time, so I switched to Firefox, which I already use on my PC at work. Firefox worked well for a bit, but then started crashing everytime I would visit weather.com. So I started using both Safari and Firefox, but how annoying is it to have two browsers open at the same time?

I also didn't really like using the new keystrokes. On a PC, I don't have to think when trying to switch between windows, copy and paste, or scroll. Whenever I had my Mac in front of me, I would have to stop for a few moments and consciously decide which keystrokes I wanted to use for the function I needed.

But I was determined to give the Mac a fair shot. A little after a year, that fair shot was over. I was tired of it. A few other things really bugged me, and I started just bringing home my work laptop so I wouldn't be forced to use my Mac. I got tired of doing that every night, so I decided to start looking for a new machine. The Mac experiment was over.

The silver lining in all of this is that Macs apparently retain their value. In January 2005, I bought my 12" iBook (before Apple announced that they were going to start installing Intel chips) for approximately $1000. Just 18 months later, I sold it on Craigslist for $550.

And the best part is that I bought a new laptop last week for $750. So in essence, I spent $200 on a pretty good system, and Circuit City kicked in an inkjet printer for free (after rebates of course).

Not bad. Not too damn bad at all. Thank you, Apple.

1 Comments:

Blogger David said...

Sorry the mac didn't work out for you, but I'm glad that you were able to make it a financially-neutral event. (in my defense, the other folks I've spoken to about mac/pc stuff have not had either the proficiency with or the attachment to the windows shortcuts...)

9:06 PM  

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