The Mac Switch – 2 Years Later

September marks the switch to Macs we made in 2006. I was not a fan of Macs in college. Most of the Macs in the computer labs were G4 towers with Zip Drives and not a lot of zest stacked against quite new and speedy 2003/2004 HP Windows machines. However, when I began working with a local photographer in 2004 I became more familiar with the iBook and Powerbook lines of Mac laptops that we used on location and began to take a liking to the Apple brand.

Geeky as I tend to be, I’m not an über geek, but with some help from friends I built my own custom PC tower. It did what I needed it to do and hauled pretty well for photo editing and design work. But it had bugs that took a lot of time to update, fix or… reformat to eradicate. When in 2006 my desktop took a dive that required a reformat, it was time to make the switch.

I got a MacBook Pro 15″ notebook, one of the Core Duo 2.16GHz ones I had drooled over for a while before the dead PC helped me decide to just make the switch. (I actually put a photo of the MacBook Pro as my PC’s wallpaper months ahead, just to let it know I wan’t thrilled and already had its replacement picked out.) I maxxed out its 2GB or RAM right away and upgraded the stock 100GB hard drive to 320GB late last year.

So 2 years later here are my observations on running a photography business on the Apple line

• Macs CAN crash, and I can make it happen. More often than not I would just stall it. However it’s from running tons of memory hungry apps all at once and not from constant virus headaches or Windows trying to update / ask me a zillion questions, no.
• “Lose control, gain command” – nice pun on the control/command key naming game. Whatever you call it, it’s much more natural to lower my thumb to hit Command (mac) instead of wrangle a pinky finger out to control (windows) for keyboard shortcuts. I’m all about keyboard shortcuts, so this little key placement swap is a HUGE improvement for me.
• No “Windows Key” or Start Menu was a little weird. Clicking the apple in the upper left corner didn’t do much either. A little puzzling at first but I started with Windows 3.0 so navigating folders / preferences panels was something I could do even if I hadn’t in a decade. The Dock keeps my most used apps anyway, and a Spotlight Search pulls up anything else I need pretty quickly.
• External drives show up on the desktop and in Finder windows. Ever use a drive and have to find the little green arrow in the system tray (windows XP anyhow) then figure out which device it is and THEN safely disconnect it? Since I’ve been running everything off a laptop all the big working files are backed up on external drives, and each shows up on the desktop when conencted. No wondering if I plugged it in, no clicking around “My Computer” to see what’s there, it just is or isn’t. Hooray simplification!
• Two finger scrolling touchpad. This isn’t news if you’ve held an iPhone, iPod touch, or a Powerbook G4 and newer laptop but… coming from a Toshiba Windows machine I love this scrolling innovation. I zip all over the place easily without reaching for the mouse (unless it’s wired up to a keyboard, monitor and drives at the desk).
• Backlit keyboard – awesome help in dim concert, reception, and event venues and rather nice for surfing from the couch in the evening.
• No virus problems. I do have a virus scanner that runs once a week or so. I do have a handful of friends that haven’t stopped forwarding me their latest virus alert emails (probably carriers of the virus, or at least being sent like one). I politely remind them that I don’t want their forwards and I certainly don’t want Windows virus alert emails.
• No reformatting just to “tidy things up.” The only reformatting I’ve done was done when trying out OS X 1.5 Leopard, adding the larger hard drive, and then moving back to OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Things I’m not so thrilled about are usually just familiar Windows apps that don’t have a complete / competitive Mac version out. (For such I use Parallels and run XP inside Mac OSX, sacriligious, I know.) I’m sticking with OSX 10.4 / Tiger as not everything I use for location work wants to run as nicely on Leopard yet. Tiger runs just fine. Sara’s MacBook runs Leopard and the biggest thing I miss about it is the Quick Look preview of just about any file without opening a needed app to see what it looks like, sounds like, or contains. I’m sure there’s a workaround.

Anyway, my 2¢ on the last 2 years of running the photo biz on a Mac.

Mac Switchers, what’s your favorite reasons?