3 posts tagged “mac”

I little over a month ago I posted "Someone help me I am becoming a Mac zealot" about my recent Mac experiences.  Well my wife purchased Parallels for my birthday so I thought that I would provide a brief update.  (not that anyone reads this).

WIth my recent gift I decided to delete my Bootcamp partition and install Parallels.  It is a bit quirky right out of the box; however once you know what to tweak it works amazingly well.  The most useless but most entertaining feature is the way the screen spins when switching to full screen mode.  I thought that was worth the $79.99 USD alone :)

Once I my life allows me to play with Parallels for a couple more hours I might even try running a game in it.  Anyone with an intel Mac should purchase Parallels.

Question of the day...
"Windows, Mac, Linux - What's your preference and why?"

I purchased my first Mac on April 4th of this year and love it.  Within months I sold my other notbook and one of my desktops.  I think Mac should be for Home and Windows for the office (depending on your line of work).

I used to hate and make fun of Apple products.  Then about ten years ago I met a Mac Zealot who was a programmer.  Over time he was able to show me some of things that Macs were capable of.  OS9 seemed to be very easy to use however their IO seemed brutally inefficient when we transfered files from my PC to his PowerBook over my network.  I still thought that PCs were superior.  Then I heard about OSX, a unix based OS. 

OSX in my mind would fix their IO issues and bring Macs closer to the mainstream (ok that is a stretch).  I started to think that if I had some extra money I wouldn't mind buying a Mac to play with.  Next Apple produced the ipod and about a year ago my wife surprized me with a nano.  Shortly after that I discovered the joy of podcasts. 

I knew what podcasts were but never had the patience to listen in front of my computer.  iTunes plus the nano made listening to podcasts convenient.  Through various tech podcast I started to get excited about the rumor of these intel Macs and their ability to also run Windows XP.

Once the intel Macs were announced I started to follow the contest to get XP running.  I think that I visited the onMac forums daily.  It wasn't long before they had the screen shots of XP loading.  Then on the morning of Wednesday April 4th (I think) they announced BootCamp.  I left work as soon as West World opened and bought a MacBook Pro.  By noon it was booting XP and I was amazed by the eligance of the hardware and OSX.

I created a 40 gig XP partition thinking that I would primarily use XP; however that has been far from the case.  Pretty much the only time I boot into XP is to play games or use MS Project or Visio.  If it were not for the gaming aspect I would move to parallels.

Now moving forward six months I have sold my Dell Laptop, sold the family PC and reassigned my gaming system to the family.  I expect our next computer purchase to be a 20 or 24 inch iMac.  It pains me to use XP, listen to the Vista issues, and deal with the Windows Genuine Advantage.  I don't think that MS gets it.

Now I realize that the Mac still does not fit in a corporate environment and is not without its own bugs, quarks, etc; but overall it is simply amazing when it comes to home and enthusiast use.  iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, garageband, etc are great.

I have become a Mac zealot.