My life as an Apple kiddie (Part I)
They say that as one gets older it becomes harder to learn new tricks and try new things. Accordingly I count myself lucky to be able to try new things even at my advanced age of 40 (and we’re not talking dog years here).
I was looking for a new workstation to help me out at work; I’m a software developer and the building and testing of code was taking way too long on my previous workstation; I was getting frustrated on how much time I was spending idling while my workstation was running a system test or a build job.
I went looking for a new system (it was about three years since my last upgrade and the fans on the old workstations were getting noisy…compared to the shuttle lifting off). I was ready to shell out some serious scratch as experience has shown that investing up front will make your system last longer; i.e. you will keep and be happy with your system longer than if you spend less for cheaper components (usually just before they become dated or obsolete anyways). Some may not agree but it’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. I stacked up a number of workstations from various vendors with more or less the same specs (as close as I could make them anyways) and you’d be surprised who actually came out less expensive than the competition.
Back in October of 2006 Apple had just released their line of Intel powered Macs and I thought I should give them a look on the grounds that I could always run Windows via Apples Bootcamp if I had to (for those who don’t know Apples computers run OS X which is quite a bit different from Windows). I had used Microsofts Windows since version 3.1 and wasn’t keen on learning a new operating system but with the potential to run Windows on the Mac Apple made the list.
Once I had my list and was comparing Apple to apples (pun intended) I was somewhat surprised that Apple not only provided great hardware it was actually less expensive than the competition. I wanted an outstanding machine for work but also a great unit for gaming (my weekend weakness). I ordered a Mac Pro with 2GB ram, a 250GB hard drive, an ATI X1900 XT video card (smokin’), and 2 Intel Xeon 2.66 GHZ dual-core CPUs.
The process of ordering online from Apple is relatively smooth but nowhere near as slick as say Dell; for one thing Apple does not offer a personal lease which in Canada at least makes it much easier to write off computer expenses for tax purposes. Nevertheless the process went smoothly and after 20 minutes on Apple’s web site my Mac Pro was on the way.
It took my machine just about two weeks to make it to my house and after some frantic unpacking I fired that bad boy up.
The first thing that’s different about a Mac over your usual PC is well pretty much everything, but more on that later.