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A few months back I decided to make a rather large change in my workflow. For nearly 15 years I had been Windows based in my home and business computer systems. This was partly due to the fact that I had 3 brothers who had many years experience with Windows and Apple and had all switched over to Windows. My younger brother Marty (an aerospace engineer) walked me through my first computer purchase- a custom Dell with 4 gigs of hard drive. He told me I would probably never fill it up. My brothers became my tech support team. Many times they helped me through virus’s, upgrades, operating system installs, hard drive failures, blue screen events and just about everything that goes wrong with PCs. My experience with Dell was fairly good. I was a loyal customer, I don’t know how many of them I bought and gave away, but I felt so strong about the company I actually bought some stock in it. Fast foward to last September. A blue screen event plagued me for 6 full days. I was unable to access my critical files on my raid protected tower. So much for raid redundancy. Quite frankly I found myself growing weary of being able to “fix” my computer. I remembered the days when I was a teenager and I was quite happy to change my own oil, even do the brakes on my car and in several instances ” switched out” clutches, transmissions and even engines. It made me feel “Macho” remember those days? Well 15 years is a long time to be married to a computer platform. Life is simply too short not to experience a refreshing change now and then. So I went out and bought a Macbook Pro (seen here) . Happily, the main program I use to accomplish my work is Photoshop which works pretty much the same on Windows as it does on Apple. So aside from getting to know a few new tricks the transition has been fairly smooth and pleasant. In December I took another plunge and purchased 2 additional Apple computers, the 27″ iMacs one of which has the new Retina display. Needless to say, the experience is quite satisfying. Boot up on the Macbook pro is about 7 seconds- the iMacs are not much behind. Right now I don’t think there is a better desktop or notebook out there. Furthermore, I have created a Raid array my system backs up to hourly, so I will never be frozen out of my important files by any incident involving a computer malfunction. Would I recommend Apple computers? Absolutely! But understand there is an adjustment that will require effort-maybe even a few Apple classes which I have immensely enjoyed. I confess that for several months I still had my Windows machines set up next to my new Apples. But last weekend I took them all down and put them into storage. I have officially made the complete switch to the “Light side”. For me the bottom line was being able to serve my cliental without interruption and to find inspiration in an entirely new interface with my work. Now if something goes wrong I wont be tempted to call my brothers and fix it. It simply will go back to Apple covered by a 3 year warrantee. By the way, I take my car to the dealer now for all maintenance, what a relief. Mission accomplished.
