I sold my soul. I bought a Mac.

There.  I admitted it.  I bought my first Mac.  After years of working with Windows (both personally and professionally) I bought a Mac.  My Windows friends will probably disown me, refuse to acknowledge my existence and probably cross the street when they see me coming.

Oh yeah, I purchased a 13″ Mac Air with a 256GB solid state drive and 4GB of RAM.

Why did I buy the Mac?

Ok, so a couple of reasons, but first a little background.  I’m one of those individuals that thinks about large purchases for days/weeks/months before pulling the trigger and making the purchase.  I had spent many hours thinking about obtaining a laptop to compliment my workstation at home.  There is a key word in that sentence.  “Compliment”.  So, in other words I didn’t need a huge beefy machine of a laptop but rather something that would run a VM (for SQL Server) and do presentations, word processing, simple stuff really.

A Couple of Reasons Why:

  1. Ease of use.  I have been in the IT field/business since about 1994, some 17years. Most if not all of those years I’ve worked with Windows base machines.  Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft produces some of the best software out there, but I’m tried of trying to fight viruses/spyware/malware/etc.  With Mac, you don’t have to worry about that as much
  2. Speed.  With a solid state drive, this thing is fast.  I mean fast.  I can reboot the laptop from OS to OS in 15 seconds.  I don’t care if you are a die hard windows nut, you have to admit, that’s fast!  It will shut down completely in about 2 seconds and startup in about 9.  Thus, when I want to work on my blog (or anything else for that matter), I can do it pretty darn quickly.
  3. Portable.  I weighed it this morning, and it came in at a whooping 2.14 pounds!
    Air Book on the scale
    It's a "Lite" Laptop, only 1/2 the calories!

    Put this thing in a bag and you’ll never even notice that it’s there.  It doesn’t get much portable than that.

  4. Battery Life.  I went to the Mac store, purchased it and then went through the in-store setup (it was free so what the heck!).  When I got back home around 4PM that evening, I started to install some applications, play around, learn, etc.  When I went to bed, I still have 22% battery life left which equated to about 1.5 hours of battery life.  Can we say AWESOME?
  5. It’s different.  Sometimes it’s good to try new and different things.  Plain and simple.
  6. For those that know me, know that I tend to research things.  I went around to my colleagues who had already drank the kool-aid and asked their opinion. These are people that I trust and value their opinion.  All of them said that they haven’t been happier moving to a Mac.  This spoke volumes for me.

What about SQL Server?

Excellent question!  It turns out that Mac runs virtual machines very well.  You can purchase a copy of VMWare Fusion for less than $100.  At the moment it’s actually on sale, so if you hurry you might a heck of a deal on it.

There is also another production, Parrallels Desktop 6.  I know absolutely zero about it, so do your research if you’re looking.  I have more experience with the VMWare suite of productions, so that’s what I’m going to use for now.

Both of them do offer a free trial so that you can evaluate them both and determine what’s best for you.

Conclusion

So yes, some will say that I’ve sold my soul to the Devil.  Some will say that I’m a traitor to my craft.  Some will start the trash talking (actually, that’s already started).  But, in the long run, I think that this was the right decision for me and what I was looking for.  This laptop is lite weight, fast, quiet (no moving parts!) and certainly does what I need it to do.

So if you can, pick one up for yourself and give it a whirl.  You might decide to actually like kool-aid. I think that I do.

© 2011, John Morehouse. All rights reserved.

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