Switcher switches back
Hawk Wings could post stories about people who switch over from Windows and are gob-smacked by the power and elegance of Mail.app over and over and over again.
Aki at Aki’s Blog has given up on the Mac dream 
after four years as a PowerBook user, and is moving back to Windows. And not just back to Windows, back to Windows on Dell.
He mentions price, Java-support and battery life among his reasons, not least “Reasonable tools exist in Windows… such that many of the productivity gains I got on my Mac are now possible in Windows.”
What does he miss? His old 12″ PowerBook has Unix and was sexy, two words that you don’t often see close together.
Tags: dell, mac, not apple mail, Productivity, switching, windowsRelated posts
May 29th, 2006 at 2:18 am
My wife recently upgraded from a Celeron 1.2ghz PC I built her three years ago to a Dell E1505 laptop (fairly nice), so I have been playing with it. XP Home SP2 runs fairly nice on it, even though it only has 256MB of RAM.
There are some really nice apps for XP out there nowadays. So far, I have installed:
-Firefox as a web browsing
-Foobar2000 for music
-Exact Audio Copy for ripping (best ripper available)
-uTorrent for bittorrent access
-VLC for Xvid/Divx
-Gmail Notifier
-Picasa 2 for photo management
-Vim 7
-7-Zip
Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) is also available for XP, although I haven’t installed it.
I think that probably the worst thing about XP is its poor security track record. I suspect a lot of it is that most people run as the administrator, which leaves the computer open to a lot of problems. In my case, I have set up a regular user account for everyday usage.
May 29th, 2006 at 2:29 am
We will have to wait and watch how the Rev B/C MacBooks and MacBook Pros perform otherwise there will be probably even more switchers.Apple’s USP is its OS and if it becomes available (never will) on PC’s there are few who might go for the hardware.
May 29th, 2006 at 2:57 am
2 things to note about this article:
1. He’s making the move primiarily for business reasons.
2. He still has and continues to use a “G5 w/ Apple Cinema Display (until they steal it back from me)”.
So, he may have a vaild reason for wanting/needing to purchase a Dell laptop but you will note that he hasn’t completely given up on the platform. I wouldn’t really classify this as a “switcher”. To use a phrase from Adam Christianson of the MacCast, he’s a “slider”. Moving back and forth between Windows and Mac.
May 29th, 2006 at 9:55 am
I’m going to buy a computer for work soon, and based on this post, I went comparison shopping. He must have got his Dell somewhere else than I was looking (dell.com). A similarly equipped 15.4″ screened Dell (Latitude D820) was $2800.10 compared to $2799 for the Mac. Plus the Dell is 0.6 lbs heavier, and 0.4″ thicker. A similar Inspiron is $2480, but was a pound heavier. Hardly compelling reasons to switch back to PCs.
May 29th, 2006 at 11:30 am
Jody, if you want exactly the set of equipment and software that Apple sells you, Apple is very price competitive. If, however, you feel you don’t need every feature, or want to trade a few around, Dells tend to be much cheaper. Dell has orders of magnitude more flexibility in their pricing and configurations. In addition, if you’re not in a hurry to buy, you can track Dell’s price fluctuations daily, buy coupons on eBay, or find many other ways to save a few hundred dollars off the initial price you find at dell.com.
That being said, I personally still prefer the Macs even though they’re always more expensive than what I’d buy if I bought from Dell.
May 29th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
I gave up reading after Aki’s first sentance - he gave up his Mac for *work* reasons. Personally, I keep my Mac for fun and serendipity (and some enjoyable professional productivity). Of course “work” is going demand a Windows box.
May 29th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
Do you think that work really “Deamnds” a Windows box these days? I was lured to the Mac with promises that I could not only survive but thrive in a Windows workplace.
Those promises turned out to be true for me.
May 29th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
I think it depends where you work. Perhaps what I should have said is that Windows boxes demand work: Labor, toil, slog, drudgery, exertion, effort, industry, service; informal grind, sweat, elbow grease. And I should know, since my dayjob is looking after Windows boxes. Of course I could use my Mac at my place of employment - but it would be against policy, it would be viewed dimly by The Man who has a huge investment in 80,000 desktops and 2000 servers - all running Windows. It wouldn’t be worth the bother of trying to explain to The Man that there are zero viruses in the wild for Mac, or that Mac does Oracle, or Mac does ODBC, or Mac does MS Office, or Mac does UNIX, or Mac does Linux, or Mac does Outlook, or Mac does ACID2, or Mac does PDF, or Mac does Virtualisation, etc, etc, etc.
Like I say, I find it easier to use my Mac, my way, on my own professional endeavours, away from The Man. I’ll leave The Man to have his lunches with Microsofties and his buzzword bingo from the business analysts du jour.
:-)
May 30th, 2006 at 7:51 am
I think Mike is forgetting one obscure thing. Today the Mac is dual bootable with Windows and a virtual windows machine is nearing completion. Translates to running virtual PC without the loss of speed we had to live with until now.
Also some other techniques that are really neat and can be used to run windows software on a Mac are clearly wisible on the horizon.
So what ever people are thinking, I think now is not just the right time to switch from Mac to win.
Hans
May 30th, 2006 at 7:54 am
With Boot Camp, there is no reason to make a switch back, for work or not. Having one machine that can do everything is the way to go.
May 30th, 2006 at 8:54 am
And Bootcamp is but the most primitive version version of such software.
May 30th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
After 8+ years of running my wife’s medical business (12 employees, 15 Macs & 2 PCs) my unplanned downtime for a Mac hosted Database has been only 3.45 hours. Hospital IT tells me that this cannot be true. Were I running it on PCs I would agree.
I can’t believe the number of horror stories I hear from other practices. One local physician’s office was down (6 PCs completely compromised!) for four days due to viruses. Luckily (and $1,800 in tech support fees later) they recovered his database. But for four days the patients that arrived did so without his knowing why. He had no access to a calendar, the patients records or any PC based services. Who can afford run a business like that? All I can say is to each his own. I prefer to focus on getting work done, not on keeping systems running.
Does anyone really care that he bought a Dell?
PS: I just installed an iMac with Windows preloaded so i can kill the two PCs. We need Windows about 45 minutes a week. Boot Camp works just fine, thank you, and I get another Mac too!
May 30th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
That’s an amazing story. The kind of thing that Apple promos are made of.