I’m so impressed. I am now a complete Apple fan.
Not that I ever was a detractor of Apple — when they came out with their new operating system, OS X, that was cool. I even bought a Mac Mini to try it out. But as a sysadmin and enterprise technology geek it had limited applications for me other than as a novelty. Well, that has changed.
You might not know that Apple switched processors (the heart of any computer) from the PowerPC chip to modern Intel chips. These are the same processors that any “PC” uses. This was an incredible move on Apple’s part. Now, insofar as all Macs come with OS X, which is very good on its own of course, the new Macs can also run Windows as their operating system! So with that in mind I finally made the plunge. I bought a decent iMac to check it out to see if the hype was worth it.
I am blown away. Apple has always been very good at designing hardware. This is no exception. The iMac is a beauty. The picture you see here is it — that’s it. No big “hard drive” case. It’s all it is. A gorgeous 20 inch widescreen that contains everything. And yes, it could not be easier to install Windows XP onto any computer — I downloaded the software that makes it happen from the Apple website and within 30 miniutes I was in business, completely. And if I so choose I can reboot the computer and go into Mac OS X and do Mac stuff.
And this thing is fast — it’s noticably faster than the PC I just got 3 months ago, by a significant margin even though that PC has, by the statistics, bettter hardware. This is running Windows on Mac hardware, folks. Apple’s software installed all the drivers and things that make the PC work pretty effortlessly. And it just works. I am doing this blog entry on my new iMac, in Windows, staring at the Apple logo just beneath my screen. I have yet to run any of my high performance games, such as flight simulator, on my new iMac. I think this is where some performance may be lost. But hell, for 90% of people this is never an issue.
an interesting side note: I think Microsoft loves that Apple switched to Intel chips. They can sell more copies of Windows to Apple lovers. It’s good for Apple, too, because they can sell hardware (which is where they make their money) and entice people to become Apple-addicted. Shrewd, shrewd move for Apple.
Anyways, my advice: Buy a Mac. And a copy of Windows. You will have the best of both worlds and never look back. I am astonished it was so easy and that I didn’t do this before.