Apple got me

A week ago or so I bought a Macbook Pro 13″, this is my very first apple labeled product. So why this sudden change?

First of all I was in the market for a new laptop I could use at school without having to worry too much about battery life, and 11″ or less is not an option. Second I needed a laptop that would not crash randomly during classes, or exam (Yes I actually tried that, and OMG I was ready to kill someone or something!) – so no BSOD or freezes. Last but not least I needed something that would allow me to perform multiple tasks, and navigate quickly.

Problem was, I had never owned anything else than Windows products. But once I got my Macbook, I quickly forgot everything about that and now I am left of wondering: Why didn’t I do it before?

Here’s a quick list of my pros and cons concerning “the change”.

What I like about Apple products:

• Ultra responsive
• Battery life (MacBook)
• Straightforward
• Multi-device features
• Design

Okay so let me just sum it up: Apples products are ultra responsive, and when I say “ultra” I mean “crazy fucking extreme”. Whenever you use the multi-touch trackpad, you really feel like the mac adjusts to your finger tips movement instantly, this also goes for the iPad and iPhone the touch screen is absolutely amazing. Also when you close the laptop (that’s a weird word, closing the laptop?) it goes to standby instantly, my airplay goes off in the second it closes. And when you open it again, it’s ready to go within a sec – I sometimes feel hung up when doing this on a windows laptop. All in all, very responsive.

The battery life is also greatly appreciated by me, software and hardware goes hand in hand on apple products. This allows the device to squeeze every bit of power out of the machine, giving you a long lasting battery life.

Straightforward.. hmm this might not apply too much for me, as I tend to figure out things on my own fairly quickly. But OS X and iOS is very complex, and isn’t hard to adept compared to windows and especially windows 8. (Good luck trying to setup your elders in windows 8 – I refuse to try!)

Because there are so few different products by apple, they can easily make multi-device features that will allow you to use your current apple device to add more features to another apple device. I have a Airport express, and I love my airplay feature very neat. For more details on Apples multi device feature focus, check out this article.

Last but not least the unavoidable: design, Apple products are really great looking in my opinion. A very minimalistic look, yet beautiful details done with laser precision. Credits to Apple for their great designs.

What I dislike about Apple products:

• Cooling
• Mouse acceleration (No feature to turn off mouse acceleration)
• Game support

Nothing is perfect and neither is Apple products.

The cooling in the previous generations of Macbook Pro is lousy, and the aluminum frame does not help out at all. It’s  alright, but not at all perfect the aluminum gets extremely hot. Fortunately they have improved the cooling in the newest Macbook Pro with retina display.

Mouse acceleration is fixable, but only by using a terminal command. Hope to see a mouse acceleration on/off feature for external mouses and pointing devices. Find the hack to turn it off at OS X Daily: http://osxdaily.com/2010/06/02/kill-os-x-mouse-acceleration-from-the-command-line/

Last but not least there a lack of game support, you don’t buy a mac to game but a few titles would be nice. Call of Duty is coming soon, and other titles might join but until now either bootcamp windows or game what you can.

Regrets?

None so far, but I am looking forward to hearing more from Linux. What I can say, is that I am not going back to windows anytime soon.

But I don’t think Windows is dying anytime soon, microsoft fanboys and Apple haters are just around the corner. Just check out my previous post on “Microsoft fanboys, and a lot of them!”