I have been meaning to get to a post to describe my experience now that I have had my MacBook for more than a week.
So a little context. I have been mulling this over for over 18 months ever since a friend helped me do the logo for Project X and showed me Garageband. When Apple went Intel, I really had no excuse anymore. So when the time was right I jumped in.
So two weeks from yesterday I ordered the PC, received it a week ago Tuesday and now have been mucking with it for over a week.
So how do I feel? Great
Buyers remorse? None
Problems? Yes
So when I got my Mac I unpacked it and started mucking around. Once I was ready and a good friend and Mac lover came over (a week ago Wed). I spent 2 hours doing my transition from the Tablet to my MacBook Pro.
Yeah two hours only. I bought Parallels ($100), installed it and set it up for coherence. Installed an instance of XP. Installed Office. Back up and running same is on the Tablet with some different interfaces. So man is this machine fast. It still took 9 hours to move my data across my slow network onto the machine, but that was OK, I did that while I slept.
I then backed up my instance by copying my Parallels file (~4 Gb) to be burned or backed up. That’s it that’s all.
OK, now it wasn’t all Roses. I then started adding Windows software. Microsoft Project, Hummingbird FTP software, Skype (I wanted to use this in the PC as I have some software that I use that is integrated in PC land). I still seemed OK. Then about two days ago, Windows update started to creep in. Fine, I let it go. Then all of a sudden it said I needed Windows XP SP2. Hey hold on. The version of XP I loaded was supposed to be already past that point. So I allowed it to load.
BANG, CRASH. My XP instance was corrupted. Problem, not really. I had backed up my instance the day before, so four (4) minutes later I had deleted the corrupted instance of the whole virtual machine (OS, Apps,…) and re-installed my XP stack. OH MY GOD. I saw first hand the true power of virtualization. Now there seems to be a wee problem on my virtual machine on an Exchange Server .OST file, but I will figure that out eventually.
So again yesterday I tried to bring my machine up to SP2. I need it for some development tools needed on my machine. Same thing. But this time I backed up my instance right before I did the upgrade. (9 minutes to back up / 9 minutes to restore) So when it failed again. I barely missed a beat. Now that is a back-out strategy.
With all that being said.
- This machine is great.
- I love the look and feel of the interaction,
- The integration of XP and OSX with Parallels is remarkable. Seemless
So having converted to the new machine, it is no longer an OS war. Parallels has ended that. It is now about what do you want to do today. I know there will be applications that over time as I renew licenses, I will move to OSX, but there are some applications that I will keep buying on the Windows XP platform.
My closing comment is that Microsoft and Apple just found a way to co-exist. As Microsoft doesn’t sell PCs this is not a revenue hit to them. As I am still running XP, Office and some other Microsoft products, there is no hit to them there. It is interesting to realize that this was not in the end a holy OS war, but an implementation of a great solution…
