I've been a fanboi now for a little over a year, having bought my iPhone 4 from the Apple store in Brighton the day after it was announced - I was initially taken aback by the £500 price tag but if you look, they are still being sold on Apple's website for £510 and you will need to pay £300-£400 on ebay for one second hand. Add in a £15 per month tariff and my costs are well under £30 a month. I could probably write a whole blog post on that subject alone ..
Anyway, the MacBook Air. Did you guess that I like it?
I should point out that my 'work' laptop is an i7-based affair running Windows 7 with all the corporate junk you'd assume - disk encryption, virus checker, domain membership and associated policy restrictions, firewall, etc. etc.
I spent most of the weekend using the Mac - browsing, downloading, using iWork, trying to understand Xcode and reading the Objective-C getting started guide. It was a pleasant experience, but I have to say that it didn't particularly impress me - it (as they say) "just worked" and I got on with what I wanted to do.
It wasn't until Monday morning when I arrived at work and resumed my hibernated work laptop that I was shocked. It took forever to get started .. I just sat there whilst it resumed first, then took the best part of 2 minutes to present the desktop. And then I needed to fire up Outlook which, predictably, seemed to take another 2 minutes .. and then it needed to download all the emails from the weekend.
Whilst all this was going on, I powered up the Mac. It turned on instantly (perhaps a few seconds) and was ready to go. If I were able to, i'd have been in my email and being productive a good 10 minutes before the PC.
I am sure it's an unfair comparison in some respects, i'm sure the PC is doing more work *somewhere* and i'm sure that, given the same OS and SSD drive, the i7-based laptop could perform better. But life isn't fair and i'm not really interested in making a PC go 'as fast' as a Mac. I just want to use the Mac.
The performance difference is enough alone, but looking at the way the hardware and OS works together it makes the experience even better - a massive touchpad and gestures with Lion just mean that you can really get productive. I was looking for the 'virtual desktop' feature in Windows 7 tonight - it isn't there. Infact, it was a power toy for a while but seems to have disappeared. Why on earth? Apple have just made it work beautifully and for the first time since I first used virtual desktops on a Sun SparkStation i'm using them again .. intact the whole experience with the Mac reminds me of the opposite experience when I moved from Sun workstations to PC's .. the PC felt clunky back then and i'm sad to say that it feels clunky right now.
Remind me again why i'd want to use Windows?
