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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

April, 2005

I Made The Switch

step2_beautyshot_pb12_050131.jpgFriday was a big day in my computer life. The 15th of April, Two-Thousand-and-Five shall mark the day I made the switch. I purchased my first Apple. It's a 12" PowerBook, fully loaded that should be arriving on Monday and I couldn't be more excited. I've mentioned before that I've been considering making the switch, but the release (at the end of the month) of Tiger officially put me over the edge. With integrated desktop search and lots of other goodies, it's now or never for me (and, just as a note, although Tiger won't come loaded on Monday, I'll get it for just the cost of shipping when it comes out on the 29th).

So why did I do it, you may be asking yourself. (Or, quite possibly, you're just asking what took me so long?) Well, it all started last June when I started working at American Demographics magazine. Against my wishes I was given a Mac upon arrival. I had never really used one before and wasn't interested in learning how. The fact that OS 9 was installed on the machine didn't help either, it meant that I couldn't get the newest browser and in turn lots of pages didn't even work. However, about two months into my time at AD I finally convinced the powers that be to hook me up with a G5 with OSX. When it finally arrived in my office, all silver and sweet, I finally got it. Everything was so simple. I got so used to Expose that when I got home I'd try to get to the desktop on my PC by moving my cursor to the "hot corner" (which, of course, didn't ever work).

Around the same time I was starting to really enjoy my Mac, my laptop was starting to screw up for the umpteenth since I bought it two years ago. I have a Presario 1500 and it hasn't really ever worked quite right. I sent it back to Compaq about 10 times trying to get random things fixed that never seemed to come back working correctly. My hard drive would continually overheat and shut the computer down and other annoyances. (Including the fact that every time something went wrong and I called up Compaq it was an awful experience.) What really pushed me over the edge, though, was having to format the hard drive every three months or so. If I didn't do this, the computer would slow down to a crawl. This just isn't sane, I told myself.

All of these events also were happening as I was moving deeper and deeper into geekdom. It seemed that every blog or webpage I read was always talking about the wonders of Apple, which got the wheels turning. Why not? I asked myself.

Tiger sealed the deal. I decided as soon as it came out I would buy a PowerBook. I chose the 12" because I want a truly portable computer. This Compaq is an eight pound behemoth. I hate carrying it around when I have to and I wouldn't ever just carry it by choice. So yesterday, for whatever reason, became the day.

And I'm proud to say I made the switch. At work and at home I'll be using an Apple laptop (iBook at work). I'll be keeping the behemoth around for a couple things (especially Soulseek), but otherwise it'll be all PowerBook all the time for me.

I couldn't be happier. Hopefully I'll feel the same way six months from now.

For any Mac users, what advice do you have? Programs I need? I've been keeping this this list of links over at del.icio.us, but any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

April 16, 2005
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.