Most people who know me would be and have been quite surprised by my decision to move over to the world of Apple. But there was actually some fairly sound logic behind it, and I am going to use this post to try and explain it 🙂
I’m a geek, and I’ve been a geek for as long as I can remember. I love technology, how it can help us, how it works, and what happens when you break it and ultimately bring it back to life again. I have bought, sold, dismantled, broken, given away, forgotten about and fixed more desktops and laptops that I can even think about counting. Ever since the day I first upgraded the RAM of my 386 DX33 powered PC from 4mb to 8mb I was hooked. And I have not really backed down from any option or challenge since then.
Going on this journey I have been able to experience a lot of different brands and products, up until VERY recently I was a pretty big convert on Microsoft’s Surface range of machines, I was sold on them from the very first ad I saw on YouTube.
Impressive hey? Something completely different to what those pretentious people at Apple are doing? he types on his Macbook
But I loved it, and I owned a few of them. My first and very apparent issue came up just after I had made the decision that I am going to adopt a more minimalist lifestyle, thinking I’ll be perfectly fine with just my Surface for all my geeky needs. Then one night while in bed I was going to Netflix and Chill when I tried to prop up the Surface on my chest… and no. The kickstand needs a solid surface to work, and holding the device up with my hand seems like such a huge effort in this age of super convenience. This got me thinking of an alternative. So I made a mental list of what my next machine needs to be.
- Powerful enough to not ever make me want to commit seppuku while waiting for a formula in Excel
- Flexible enough that I can use one machine for streaming, working, gaming and general internetiness fun
- Durable enough that I can keep moving it around no matter where I can and what I throw at it
- Portable enough in terms of weight and battery life
That’s a pretty solid list hey? And when I laid out this list it jumped on me VERY quickly. I need an Apple laptop… Macbook, because you can’t call a Macbook a laptop.
So the hunt was on and on the most un-minimalist day out there, Black Friday, I found workhorse. A refurbished Macbook 13″ with Retina Display. There was another option, a Macbook Air 13″, but I was lucky enough to be able to have both machines next to each other with the same wallpaper on them and the Retina display blew the Air out of the water! 2560×1600 goodness!
So now I had a Macbook and a Surface… which seemed counterproductive in terms of the functionality of each device. So seeing that I made the shift to Apple I figured why not adopt more of the architecture in my life and consolidate my tech needs a bit more. Off I went to my favourite little treasure trove of shopping, Gumtree, and I posted the option to swap my Surface for an iPad. A bite followed very quickly and I had an iPad.
Does this mean now that I have given up on my geek creativity and I have become one of those Apple people? Probably not, but I do really appreciate what these machines can do. I love it and this will be the machine that is going to carry me into 2019 at least. Or that is my own personal challenge that I’ll elaborate on more in another post.
So watch this space 🙂