Mac Switch

I presented a ppt to a friend yesterday who congratulated me on finally making the switch to a Mac. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, and we both used to be closet Mac fans. In the past, we would frequently discuss the temptation to switch over. You know – really switching over. . . as in use a Mac for more than a home computer to edit photos of the kids. His comment reminded me of how long it had been since we had seen each other because I switched over about 8 months ago with unheard of ease.

When we finished our fundraising this past summer, my partners and I gathered for an off-site. One of the many topics of discussion was computing platform. We noticed that more and more of the entrepreneurs we were seeing presented on Macs. We strive to serve our customer (the entrepreneur) really well, so it made sense for us to consider this trend. After all, good entrepreneurs acutely understand how to get the most value out of a dollar, and the types of entrepreneurs that we spend time with are most at home ahead of a market. This was a great catalyst to check out the ramifications of a “switch.” I was up for the challenge and excited to try, as I have a long history with Apple products and great respect for their quality and design sense.

I purchased a MacBook 17″ in July, and our team thought it would be an interesting idea to document the switch on our blog. We assumed it would be a difficult process full of glitches, lost files, erroneous setup options, and other pitfalls resulting from the folly of attempting to use the Mac platform as a primary business machine. It would be a six month trial period, and we envisioned a series of posts to this blog discussing the shortcomings and surprises of the shift. First a post on adjusting to Entourage, then maybe another post about coping with the loss of the beloved right click.

Then a funny thing happened. I never posted on this topic. I switched over 8 months ago and never looked back. There was no pain (except a bad printer driver for our office printer). The Mac has performed every task imaginable for business and home computing effortlessly. It is faster, more powerful, better integrated, and significantly more stable than any PC I have ever owned, and I have owned quite a few. No adware, malware, or viruses. Support of any PC application through Parallels. Built-in video conferencing with iChatAv, which my partners and I use regularly. In fact, iChatAV now serves as our firm’s primary video conferencing system across coast running on two MacMinis. Talk about capital efficient: our weekly conference calls run over iChatAV and our standard IP network. My personal rave is that I have literally only rebooted the MacBook a handful of times in 8 months of ownership. Power management is exceptional. I open and close it throughout the day for days and days, months and months. It has never crashed, and certain features of OSX such as Spotlight change the way I compute.

I’ll leave it to the professionals (in this case Om, Liz and Katie) to analyze Vista vs. OSX and all of the ensuing choices for the business users, but yesterday’s meeting reminded me of how stable this choice has been. The Mac platform is a robust business OS. If you’re thinking about it, jump. You won’t miss rebooting.

Imagine the possibilities when you can hold all of this power in the palm of your hand. .