Monday, March 18, 2013

Why I'm a PC User

I've been a prosumer of Apple products since my college graduation and have just sold my last Mac, an early model Intel based iMac.  I had saved up for the purchase for the purpose of getting the 256MB ATI Radeon X1600 and a 20" display.  A huge upgrade from my vastly underpowered 1.4Ghz AMD Athlon with a nVidia GeForce 4600 8x AGP.

It was a the Golden Age of World of Warcraft, and with a peer running Ventrilo server, I was enjoying maxed out graphics (AAx4 aside) at 1680x1050.  Next to my old 12" PowerBook G4 it was greased lightning.

I didn't leave Apple, Apple left me


When I started using Macs, the G5 had just come out and after taking my Java and Linux courses in college, I was apt to get my hands on something with UNIX frameworks under the hood.  Everything was Fedora vs Mandriva back then, and SuSE was coming in strong with the YaST experience, but I choose Gentoo.  There was a fork of the portage tool that ran under Mac OS X and it was a dream for playing with open source software.

Indie developers like Rogue Amoeba, Flight Meat, and Delicious Monster were making waves, years ahead of the App Store market.  I remember going to the MacWorld Expo just to have the chance to meet the guys behind the software.  Never mind that I never wrote a lick of code myself.

Wither OS X


Fast forward a few years.  Introduce the iPhone.  iTunes is still making a killing.  And now merge the two platforms together.  And remove mouse buttons from track pads.  Flip scrolling directions.

Don't get me wrong, some of the apps being developed for the mobile platform are amazing.  And conversely, some of my favorite apps are still awesome.

And never mind that I've been supporting Microsoft infrastructure applications for the past eight years.  I've done my fair share of USB-serial cables passed-thru to VMware Fusion to reprogram APC UPS equipment in HyperTerminal in third-world countries, but it's time to move on.

Going Blue, in the Cloud


The best Microsoft experience is on the Microsoft platform.  Now that I'm a quintuplet MCITP and dual MCSA, I've clearly chosen my platform of choice.  But given that most of that isn't on bare metal anymore, I do just about everything in The Cloud.

The only problem keeping me from switching to something like a Surface RT for the majority of my home life is storage (where do you put 40GB of music and 20GB of photos?) and x86 support.  But I'm sure that'll come along shortly.

To be honest


Once the warchest is built up, I'll still probably get a replacement Mac at some point.  But it'll have to be the right price and the right hardware.  I've got my budget to stick to after all, and I can't stand Intel HD Graphics chips.  I've experienced too many strange glitches and performance issues.

No comments:

Post a Comment