My relationship with Apple products has always been a love-hate type. Well, maybe not that intense. Probably more like a love-dislike type of intensity. I was been a Windows person for as long as I can remember. The decision to stick with Windows for so long was based mostly on work environment than on personal choice. Where personal choice is allowed to express itself, I have to say that the prices of Apple products are not a great help to move in that direction either. Yeah, I know, you get what you pay for. The problem was that I could not convince my mind to pay for it.
The other thing I dislike about Apple is how they tell you what you need / want. To rub it in, they do know what they are doing most of the time. They are so good at creating products that you ended up wanting. Even if it goes against the flow of the crowds. When I say Apple, it is pretty much synonymous with referring to Steve Job. We all know the two cannot exist apart from each other. And I have high regards for Steve’s visionary approach to Apple. Yet as a consumer, especially a technical one, it sometimes gets frustrating to patiently wait for new features or enhancements to their next product releases and to end up disappointed that they were not included. In spite of all the endless consumer suggestions or expressed desires, you get what Apple thinks is good for you. This was one the reasons why I held back for so long from jumping into the Apple wagon. Well, no matter how much resistance you may have, eventually they get to you. That is if you let your guards down and allow yourself to use an Apple product, say the iPad, iPhone or the Mac OS X.
Sometimes we do not control how our life script would end up to be. The path we choose will inevitably decide the direction we take. For me that came with a new job last December working as a web developer. As it turned out, our development platform is all Mac OS X based. I would not say it was painful to have to switch to the Mac platform. As much as I hate to admit it, I have actually come to like the Mac experience. Ok, you had me… I love the experience. Especially working in web development using Ruby on Rails. The difference is like day and night, when compared with using the Windows platform. Before someone start to take a shot at me for making this statement, I better qualify it as a “IMHO”. After having used the OS X for more than 6 months, I can’t see myself going back to my old way of using Windows for web development. I can understand now from a first hand experience why more than 90% (my guess) of the Rails developers I meet are all using a Mac.
My old Toshiba Windows laptop has served me so well for so long, more than 6 years to be more specific. It had even survived a 4 foot drop in a car park, falling out of my laptop bag. The binding around the screen is about to peel off. But it is still working in spite of that. A few weeks ago I even spilled half a cup of coffee on it, and I thought that this must be the end of it. But it is still going strong. Even though I may feel somewhat sentimental towards this faithful servant, it is really past its time, I need to retire it for secondary usage. And in looking for a replacement, I went back and forth between getting another Windows machine and A Mac book pro. If I have not been using a Mac OS X the past 7 months, I might have resisted the temptation to jump the wagon. As it was, the pull was much too strong and I finally caved in. I guess that’s why Apple’s strategy involves getting kids in school to use the Macs and when they leave school, it is a no brainer that they will end up getting a Mac, assuming they are able to afford it. Anyhow I ended up getting myself a 2011 version MacBook Pro, a few days after Apple launched its new MacBooks. This was a good time to buy an older version product at a good reduced price. So after all the years of resistance, it was just futile to stay away and finally I jumped into the Apple MacBook wagon… much to my personal delight..