03 January 07 - 15:20Switched

I'm starting the new year as a Mac user.

Previous to that, I'd been a Windows user for over ten years. That's a pretty big change, so, this being my bent, it got me thinking on the nature of big changes. There are plenty of questions to ask: why change at all ? What to change to - why this particular change ? How to tell if the change was worth it?

My previous computer was a very nice Windows laptop from Fujitsu-Siemens, a Lifebook C1110 model. Very, very quiet - it's what I liked best about it - hardly ever a whisper from its fans except on the rare occasions where I did anything that put a strain on the CPU.

It was (in fact is) still quite functional; the main motivation for the change was that the old computer is now a fully depreciated asset, or whatever the accounting jargon is for "it's time to buy a new one for tax reasons". As a one-person business I am subject to the same incentives as any other business. If I have more cash than I need to buy groceries, I can either keep the extra cash or spend it on something business-related. If I keep the cash, I'll pay taxes on it. If I spend it, I won't pay taxes on it - even better, if I spend it on something that counts as "capital" rather than as "expense", I get extra deductions at tax time.

In retrospect, that strikes me as a risky reason to change. Rather than change to something better than what you have, or to something you need, you change in order not to lose some advantage that only accrues if you make the change.

So I looked at what was now available on the laptop market. I wanted to buy reasonably current hardware, from a reasonably reputable outlet. If anyone in that space had advertised a completely silent laptop, I would have bought that in a minute. But that was not the case; apparently "noise level" is simply not among the features that differentiate one laptop for another. I can learn more technical details about a given laptop model than I'll ever want to know, from the CPU speed to the manufacturer of this or that component, but no one bothers to measure the noise it makes. There's an interesting lesson here about "choices" in the laptop market - you have plenty of choice, as long as you're choosing based on things the manufacturers think are worth basing a choice on.

I figured it would be best to buy a well-manufactured and well-designed laptop, where low noise level would be part of overall quality. That's when I started looking in the direction of Apple. Since I couldn't be sure of how well my primary criterion would be met, I started paying attention to the other criteria: stability of the system (Windows XP was a huge improvement over its predecessors in that area, but there was still plenty of room to do better) especially over long periods of time; support for the apps I use every day; performance (for those rare times when I do need it), etc.

What made Macs alluring was the recent switch to Intel chips, and the even more recent announcements of several choices for running Windows on Intel Macs. I knew that Mac OS X had as its lower layer a decent Unix system, so the virtualization options meant that I could look forward to running three OSes on a single machine - Windows, Linux and Mac. I could (at least in theory) ease the transition by running my Windows apps in the background while I got used to the Mac.

I thought about it for quite some time, and finally decided to make the jump. And... I found plenty not to like about my new Mac.
 
It's noisy, for a start. The fans spin at a constant 2000 rpm, which is quite noticeable in the quiet of my living room, where I do a lot of my work - one of the major perks of being a freelance consultant. The silver lining is that the noise is constant: it's annoying when I turn the machine on, but I get used to it after a while. Back when I'd bought the Lifebook I'd briefly owned another brand, which left the fan turned off for a while, then turned it on full when the CPU got hot, then turned it off... I'd returned it to the store within two hours.

The keyboard layout is not quite optimal. I much prefer having separate "PgUp" and "PgDown" keys. Of course, there's also the pain of having to get used to an entirely new set of keyboard shortcuts, and several keys that I use a lot - braces, tilde, minus, etc. - are in entirely different places on a Mac keyboard. For some reason though I seem to be getting used to that quite fast.

The screen comes set to a resolution (1440x900) which makes me feel like an old person, after getting thoroughly used to 1024x768 for all these years. This was particularly bad when I used the Windows emulation mode; on the Mac the system fonts feel at least a little bigger. It was so bad that I decided to use a lower resolution, at least for a little while. It was so bad that, much sooner than I thought I would, I bit the bullet and migrated ten years' worth of emails to the Mac email program, instead of using Windows emulation to run Pegasus Mail (which had been the main reason to try the Windows emulation program in the first place).

There are also many things that I do like. The OS is very solid, its user-friendliness is what you'd expect from Apple, it comes with a ton of free software development tools which promise a lot of fun in the coming year, the other bundled apps are cool.

Even though I did it with my eyes open, and there are many benefits... change is a pain. Sometimes change just can't be avoided, though. (One of my favorite bits of silliness in the news this year's end: a group of protesters who held a rally on December 31 to protest the switch to the new year. "No to 2007 !")
 
So I'll renew for 2007 my resolution to always be gentle when urging change on others, even at their request, even with the best of intentions, even with the most valuable of benefits to be gained from the change. And I'll renew for 2007 my resolution to fully savor life after a change - to truly make the best of my new situation and new capabilities.

And I wish you all the same for the new year.

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