Convert or Traitor?

I have never used a mac.  In fact, I’m the person who once sat in front of a mac and couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing on.  (I was in college at the time and wound up typing my paper on an electric typewriter).  But I work at an art school and there are lots of people who use macs.  In our technology office we have dedicated pc  and mac technicians and there has always been a (mostly) friendly debate over which system is best.  I’ve never concerned myself too much with the dialog since many of the administrative applications that I work with don’t run (or don’t run well) on macs.

And then apple had to go and start building machines with intel chips.

I got caught up in the hype.  I was intrigued by the murmurings around the office about how well the new macs were running XP.  I was un-nerved by the increase in the number of requests from staff and faculty to get macs instead of pcs. 

And then Vista was released.

So in the interest of evaluating Vista and seeing how our administrative applications run on the new OS, I now have a dual boot MacBook (running Vista and OS X).  For the past week I’ve been configuring Vista and loading applications on to the new machine so that I can run it side by side with my XP machine.  Our wicked smart mac tech Joe Jordan was so thoughtful to make the default os Windows, so it wasn’t until last night that I decided to see what happened when I booted up to the mac partition.  It was interesting, but I wasn’t that impressed – Vista is a lot closer to the mac look and feel than any other Microsoft OS so it didn’t seem all that different.

And then today I had a short tutorial with Joe.  I feel in love.  I realized that the mac seemed so unimpressive to me because it really is that simple – and oh!  how elegant.  I’ve realized how accustomed I am too bad layout and poor labeling.  I realized how many pc-based applications (not just Microsoft) are overly complex and clunky with little regard for usability.  Until today I had just accepted that it was reasonable to have to repair applications and have a computer lock up because a device was unplugged.  And with my discovery of the mac I now have a whole new set of expectations for computing experiences.

I don’t think I can realistically make the switch to 100% mac – enough of our software packages don’t seem to work and I still miss the pc keyboard.  However, I’ve had a few surprises that make me really wish I could make the change:

• Palm hasn’t released updates to it’s sync routines for Office 2007 (using mac’s Entourage, I was able to synch with my Treo with Exchange in seconds)
• Software vendor MindManager will let me swap my pc license to a mac license for free provided I complete the “letter of destruction” that they sent to me
• I can work via wireless in my office on the mac but not on my pc
• Vista runs wonderfully on the mac 

I do think we’re going to see more and more mac users at my institution -- and I would not be surprised to see this happen in liberal arts colleges as well.  The impact of a shift like this would not be insignificant (think of staffing, skill sets, training, application development, software licensing…).  For the moment I’m going to continue to spend time “evaluating” so that I can understand the options and make informed decisions.