Wed, 13 Dec 2006

Doing the Mac thing

My wife's windows laptop had a complete hard drive failure. This was also in addition to an earlier battery failure (5 minute charge time) and some physical issues that involved juice and soda. It was time to go laptop shopping.

After looking at a bunch of junk low end PC's, we came across a very well priced group of MacBooks in the $1000-$1500 range with some very nice specifications and fast intel processors. Oh, they also ran OSX, which is cool too.

We decided to do something a little different and jump into a completely different platform than we were used to. We bought two and threw away our PC's. The mere value of running Windows XP in a virtual machine sandbox was good enough reason alone. So far, we haven't had to install such garbage yet as OSX meets all our needs. There was at least one close call that involved web broswer plug-ins for her online class, but that has since been resolved.

Microsoft Office for Mac is a real life saver. As far as productivity software goes, you can't beat Microsoft's line of office products. Its how business gets done. OpenOffice and its variations, as much as I love it, is a buggy, bulky piece of crap. It means well, but after my wife ran that garbage for a years time, I was almost to the point of shelling out $300 and buying the real deal. This time, we went with student edition, which includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, for something shy over $100. Nobody verified our college ID (even though its legitimate), and they even gave us *3* licenses. Since we have His and Her MacBooks, it was great to get office on both of these suckers for that price.

With Apple now on the Intel platform, I really can't come up with one good reason why someone wouldn't get a Mac.

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