Around ten years ago my parents bought me an Apple Mac to help with my college work. I was studying Graphic Design at the time and even though money was tight they knew that it would be a valuable investment for a budding designer like myself. The Mac was one of those old beige Performa’s and at the time I was rather pleased with it. So you can imagine how gutted I was to find that just a couple of months later all those beige, box like Performas’ in the local computer store (PC World) had been replaced by snazzy, curvey and extremely cool looking iMacs!. I had never seen a home computer like it before, no one had.
Fair enough, my old, dowdy Performa done it’s job. I had the imaging software I needed installed, and without it I no doubt would have found college a lot more of a struggle, but I couldn’t help feel that little bit dissapointed, and some of that dissapointment, rightly or wrongly, was directed at Apple. If I’d known the iMac was just around the corner I would have waited that little bit longer.
Gradually, a couple of years down the line and I started to find that the Performa could no longer hack the pace, it simply could not provide the sort of things I now expected from my home computer. My friends all had PC’s, they were playing the latest games with impressive graphics, they were surfing the internet, they were downloading music, they were watching movies, and a few of them were running the latest versions of Photoshop and Illustrator too. I couldn’t do most of that stuff on my Mac, it was very frustrating.
When I graduated from college, I was lucky enough to find employment straight away, literally the day I left. I already had plans for my first pay packet, I was going to spend the lot on a new computer. But what was it going be this time? Was I going to stick with Mac or make the switch and get myself a PC? As it happens I ended up choosing a PC over a new Apple Mac, and that’s what I owned ever since. that is, up until now!
Faced with the problem of moving to a new house, which is so small that I don’t have the room to fit a desktop computer in, I decided I was going to have to buy myself a laptop and get rid of my old desktop PC. I started browsing through the Dell website and perusing the Sony laptops online, weighing up all the pro’s and cons, and trying to figure out the best deals. Out of curiousity more than anything, I payed a visit to the Apple Store webite, just to see how things had progressed since the days of my chunky, beige breeze block, I had absolutely no intention of buying anything at all. Things had moved along just fine, impressively so infact, and much to my own surprise I found myself uncontrolably drawn towards the MacBook Pro 15.4″ with 2.16Ghz Core Duo, it looked so good, a lot of thought and care had so obviously gone into its design and the same could be said for everything in the Apple range… It had me under its spell, one click of the mouse, and £1,699 later, I had ordered myself a brand, spanking new MacBook Pro. I had returned to Mac after all these years in the PC wilderness, and my poor credit card was feeling rather battered!
Was it worth making the swap? Was it money well spent or have I just made a rather bad financial decision at a time when I need to be counting the pennies?
I will tell you when I give the full MacBook Pro Review next time…
