Switch: One year later
One year after the Switch, I'm still quite happy with my MacBook Pro (now running Leopard). Although it took me a couple of weeks to get accustomed to the differences in keyboard layout (@, Cmd vs. Ctrl, brackets etc.)...
Pros:
- very beautiful, thoughtfully designed (and fast) hardware and software, great user experience
- changing networks and plugging/unplugging external displays just works (some of these things required reboots on my Windows laptop)
- Unix command line, Mac GUI, Windows VMs - definitely the best of all three worlds
- Spotlight, Finder, Quick Look and the ubiquitous PDF support are a huge advantage over Windows
- I like TextWrangler and iTerm better than similar free software that's available for Windows
- high fun factor; kids love Photo Booth
Cons:
- not crash-free; it's freezed and crashed as often as my Windows XP laptop (although most of the problems seemed to be caused by the third-party ISDN adapter driver)
- it loses the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse every two or three days, I have to search for it via System Preferences (how would you do that on an iMac when your only mouse is not working?)
- the screen cannot be opened wide enough for an optimal viewing angle (my old Acer laptop screen could be opened 180 degrees)
- no free VMware Player and no VMware Console for the Mac (but Fusion is cheaper than Workstation)
Here's the software I'm actually using:
- Apple Address Book, Automator, Dictionary, Front Row, GarageBand, iCal, iChat, iPhoto, iTunes, Photo Booth, Safari, Time Machine
- Adium
- Google Earth
- iTerm
- Jing
- Mozilla Firefox
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- NetNewsWire
- OpenOffice.org
- PasswordSafeSWT
- PHP
- ArcSoft PhotoStudio (was bundled with my scanner)
- Skype
- TextWrangler
- TNEF's Enough
- Tunnelblick
- VMware Fusion
Interesting: Just 13 months ago (as it has been for more than ten years), every laptop and desktop computer in our company was running Windows (with Linux servers and a few Macs for testing). Today one third of the company works on a Mac...