"Are you kidding? Do you know what I do for a living?"
No, I told him. I thought he was a loan officer or something.
"No, jackass. I run the creative department. That's all we do is design and publishing and graphics stuff. And we use PC's."
You do? I'd known him for years and had the wrong idea all along.
"Yeah," he continued. "The only reason to get a Mac is if you're some kind of hippie and just want to be weird."
...
So his line of reasoning was a little harsh but it got me thinking. I was in the market for a new computer (the one I got in college was starting to show its age) and was very seriously considering a MacBook as a replacement. The short list of things I'd be doing were:
- word processing
- music playback
- light photo editing
- wasting time on the Internet
- audio engineering and editing
- maybe some kind of desktop publishing for school
No number-crunching there, I thought. Just all sorts of creatively-oriented endeavors. The obvious answer there is to go with a Mac. Isn't it?
Consider that for years I've been doing all of those things on my trusty desktop - a desktop which hasn't been anywhere near top-of-the-line since the summer of 2000. Transparency, filtering, dither, MIDI interfacing, sequencing - all supposedly hardcore tasks, and all supposedly impossible to do on a Windows-based machine.
By the same token, the old adage still rang true that "change is good." Shake things up. Go left where you once went right. Ride the lightning. Et cetera. Plus, I thought it would be cool to be one of those Apple guys for a little while.
You know, like the guys you see sitting in a coffee shop or park or store or café or restaurant or other public place with their laptops out? And it's usually some weird time of day (or night) and they're staring intently at the screen, obviously working on something so huge that they just had to leave the house and sip on some kind of ridiculously named beverage while getting their script/video/song/story/inane blog post/"project" ready to unleash upon the world? And everything I own has an "i" in the name?
"Check out how I can capture to iFilm with my iSight and can export it to iTunes to play on my iPod and then re-upload to iLife. Oh, and I'd like a iBurger with an iShake please."
Yeah, I was going to be that guy. Minus the eyewear. Maybe not so heavy on the iWear either.
...
But in the end I went with a Dell. Why? Because the MacBooks are still a new product and are still getting the kinks worked out (like the mooing and the staining and the notorious glare). This, as some of you know, flies squarely in the face of the First Rule of Information Technology: never adopt the first generation of a technology or a product unless waiting will cost you your job.
So I listened to my inner IT professional - the one I thought I'd left for dead - and stayed the course. No big deal. Instead of the MacBook guy at the Starbucks, I'll be the Dell guy at the bar.
Sounds more fun anyway.