Why a new Mac?
August 28, 2007My home PC was about five years old and dragging running WinXP. I tried a little experiment with Ubuntu and I liked it a lot – more than XP for what I was doing at home. I but could never get sleep mode and color photos on the Canon Pixma i4000 working right, and those proved to be deal killers. After a few months, I gave up.
So I needed a new computer – web, e-mail, spreadsheet, photos, minor video – basic stuff.
Reasons I decided to try a Mac:
- With Firefox, OpenOffice, and Parallels, you no longer need Windows to run your most used apps. I decided the only app I really needed to run that required Windows was MS Money, and Parallels has that task covered.
- My new favorite programming language is Ruby, and that crowd is full of switchers. No need for Windows to write web apps.
- Lot’s of people I respect have been leaving Windows for a Mac and cite the “OS’s are becoming irrelevant, so why not use a beautiful OS” meme. See Marc Andreessen (he of Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and the cover of Time Magazine fame) and Marc Cuban (he of the Dallas Mavericks, broadcast.com, and collaring his Yahoo! stock fame).
- I’ve got Greg to rely on for tech support.
- I’d liked NOT using XP so much with Ubuntu, but needed a little more driver support and ease of use.
I waited for the new 24-inch iMac’s to come out and snagged one the first week. The display is unreal, the desktop is beautiful, and everything just works. I can run WinXP in a window faster than on my old computer, and I can even drop down into Terminal for a bash shell. There’s a reason I’m seeing more and more Mac notebooks at every conference I go to.
Dan, are you using Rails, too, and are you developing apps with either or just prototyping/research coding?
Mike – I’ve done a little bit of Rails, but this is mostly just screwing around, research kind of stuff. Working through ideas that are web based is so much easier using Ruby/Rails than .NET. We also use some Ruby at the office for back end admin and scripting type of stuff.