I’m coming out of the closet

Yes, it’s true. I’ve kept it quiet for the past month or so, but now it’s time for me to confess. I bought a Mac. A MacBook Pro, in fact. Here’s one of the reasons why:

What we’ve got here is the Safari browser (fastest in the world? probably…) in the background, Slingplayer playing my satellite TV and VMWare Fusion running Fritz 9 (a chess program, in case you hadn’t noticed, using Direct X 9) in the foreground under Windows XP.

If I’d tried this with my previous XP based laptop, it probably would’ve melted.

There’s also half a dozen running apps in the Dock.

There’s a ton of reasons I decided on a Mac after using Windows machines since 3.1. I won’t bore you with all the details - they’ve all been covered elsewhere. Suffice to say that, after using it for a month, I can’t see myself ever going back. There was a pretty steep learning curve for me, but now I’m used to it, it does seem more intuitive. It was more a case of un-learning “the Windows way”.

My main fear was all the Windows apps I’ve used and, err, loved over the years. I needn’t have worried. There’s usually a Mac equivalent and if there isn’t, there’s VMWare (I first tried Parallels, but found it a bit unstable) or Bootcamp. I’ve also got a separate XP install using Bootcamp, which I use exclusively for my flight sim stuff and with great success.

If, like me, you’ve spent ages thinking about getting a Mac but had nagging doubts, go get one. You’ll love it.

Happy New Year.