Jumping Ship

Greetings, and welcome to Jumping Ship! I decided to start this blog as a sort of personal log of my transition from a Windows-based environment to a Mac-based one. I originally came up with the idea for starting after I read another blog that performed a similar function, and ultimately helped make up my mind that it was time to switch. My hope is that after reading and following my account, you will be compelled to switch as well, or at least be compelled to look further into OSX. In addition, I hope that those readers out there who are long-time Mac users will contribute to the knowledge base I hope to build here, through their comments and feedback to jumpingshipblogATgmailDOTcom. With that in mind, I thought I’d kick things off with some of the reasons I decided that a Mac was right for my next computer purchase.

My current setup is a custom desktop build I designed three years ago this fall, running Windows XP Pro SP2, and it’s starting to get a little long of tooth (for those interested, it’s based around an Athlon 3200XP+ and an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Mobo) . Nevertheless, it has served me fairly faithfully, and up until recently, has done all I have needed it to do. But this past spring I began to do some photography work for one of the newspapers at my school, and it was then I realized that I was going to need something mobile. The entire newspaper office runs OSX, and my editor encouraged me to take a look at what he felt was the OS for content creation. With powerful photo apps such as CS3 and Aperture being the software standard at the paper, I knew it was worth considering.

Unlike many people who make the switch to OSX, I have been satisfied with my Windows experience, especially under XP Pro. It is the most stable version of Windows I’ve ever used (perhaps with the exception of 2000 pro), and the problems I have encountered have been few and far between. The issue stability-wise for me, however, is that those few problems I have had have come in the form of complete OS failure, rootkits, and faulty drivers. And although I am a diligent updater and backup-archivist (some might even say a bit paranoid), I still find myself losing data now and again. The appeal of a less virus-laden and more controlled hardware standard present in Mac system design has also won points with me in that regard.

But more than anything, the one thing that has convinced me that Macs are the way to go for me is the recent switch by Apple to an Intel-based processor architecture. This in my opinion is one of the most important improvements Apple has made in recent years, making it easier to not only write software cross-platform for developers, but also to compare benchmarks between PCs and Macs, and also to run Windows side by side with OSX. The dual-booting options presented by Apple in the form of Boot Camp, and the third party virtualization offering in Parallels sealed the deal for me; now I could have all of the great features and stability of OSX, while still being able to fall back on Windows should a program not come with Mac support.

Simplicity, thoughtful design, and compatibility: three facets of the Mac interface that I have found in both first-party hardware and third-party applications for Mac, and I hope that as you read this blog you will find, as I have, that Macs have come a long way from the Apple II, and they are here to stay.