In early 2009, the hard drive of my laptop failed. Replacing a hard drive is trivial, but I had been saving for a while and decided it was time to buy a new machine. In the beginning, I had no intention of switching to a Mac — I hated Apple, and I had always hated Apple.
Around the time my drive failed, tech blogs were raving about the new ‘unibody’ MacBook Pro. When I learned that you could run Windows natively on a Mac I thought I’d see what all the hype was about. I was never going to pay that much for a laptop, but I was curious.
It took me three attempts to walk into the Apple store, over two separate days. I don’t have an aversion to fanboys, as such, I just found the store really intimidating (and I still do). You see, I lack what Malcolm Gladwell calls a ‘sense of entitlement’, which is to say that by default, I don’t feel worthy. Yeah, high school was not much fun. Apple stores are full of shiny, happy, stylish people, and I wasn’t one of them. But I digress.
Once in the store, I made a beeline for the unibody MacBook Pros, failing miserably to look as nonchalant and aloof as those around me. I had to admit, it was a pretty nice laptop. Compared to my old Samsung R50, it was svelte, well built, and stylish. The software looked like some horrible Gnome-based Linux distro, but that could be wiped for a clean Windows installation. Whatever, I wasn’t going to pay that much for a laptop. So I left the store.
Over the next few weeks I continued my search. There were some nice options, but my mind kept returning to the MacBook Pro. And so, like some annoying tune stuck in my head, I had to play it again. I went back to the Apple store. Yep, it was just as good as I remembered. This time, though, I was here to find fault.
Nope, nothing.
Save for the software, there really wasn’t anything I disliked. The screen was nice; the keyboard felt nice; it boasted twice the battery life of other laptops; the trackpad was amazing; it was ‘a bit showy’, but not egregiously so. My one reprieve might have been the price, but that’s where regular humans and I digress: to justify the inordinate amount I spend on gadgets, I live by the axiom “price isn’t a feature, it’s a barrier to entry”, and I had the cash. Screw it. So after one failed attempt (it exceeded my card limit), I purchased a MacBook Pro.
I was a f**cking Mac user.
The first thing I did was install Windows via bootcamp. I lived happily as a Windows-on-Mac-denialist for a few days (Who me? No, I’m not a Mac user, I’m running Windows), but my laptop was my work computer; on my first day in the office I was branded a filthy Mac convert.
I had dual-booted my previous laptop with Windows and Linux. Rather than installing Linux, I decided to conduct all terminal spelunking using OS X. To my surprise, it was a competent Unix system: In fact, unlike Linux, it worked. As with my previous Linux installation, I decided to add a Windows VM to OS X. Through the magic of Parallels, this time I didn’t even need to waste disk space, it could boot from the existing Windows partition. Sweet. It worked so well that soon I stopped booting from Windows entirely.
As I began to find Mac and platform-agnostic equivalents of my favourite applications, I gradually stopped using the Windows virtual machine, too. Eventually, the only Windows-exclusive apps I used were those for designing electronics, which proved hard to replace on a Mac. But I have since found a platform-agnostic electronics design workflow, so for the first time ever, I removed the Windows virtual machine from my Mac. It took 4 years, but I’m officially a Mac user. OS X still seems like a bastardised Linux distro, but it’s like a comfy pair of slippers — it’s my bastardised Linux distro.