For a little over a month now I've been the proud owner of an (ironically now out dated!) Apple MacBook. It's been ten years since my family got one of those newfangled computers; an auspicious darling that cost upwards of a thousands pounds and ran Windows 98 as well as the government does border control. Funny thing is despite the hardware failures, the daily blue screens of death and the small house fires it caused, I always went back to being perfectly happy with the incredible speeds of 52k dial-up the moment it worked again.

This mentality of self harm is created from the presumption that all computers are like this. Time may have passed but as a previous Windows XP and Vista user myself, I know that a decade has done little to solve the problems that slow and unstable operating systems have and the sheer noise pollution from the twenty-nine hundred fans that keep the OS ticking over for just five more minutes. A catastrophic problem with my Dell laptops screen hinge is what finally pushed me to buy a new system, and with an opportunity put in my hands thanks to the governments willingness to throw money in my general direction and Apples student discounts, I made the leap to the Mac.
Now I don't want to sound like one of those elitist macintosh fanboys that plague the Internet with poor bodily hygiene, but I have to confess that it took less than a couple of hours using OS X for me to decide that I never wanted to spend money on a Windows machine ever again. This may sound like pre-school teaching, but the idea of an operating system that simply works isn't incredibly difficult to grasp, but so far it seems that Apple are the only ones who have actually been able to realise this concept.

Minutes after turning the system on my account had been set up, I was online and downloading the surprisingly few pieces of software I needed that weren't preloaded on the device. The first couple hours on my Dell laptop on the other hand were spent removing all the crap they had pre-installed. The built in software alone would be worth extra for, with such quality packages as iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band making things that took hours to do on Windows so much simpler. The built in camera and microphone are also incredibly well incorporated into the entire system, making video chat across the globe possible out of the box.

Installations are a simple drag and drop affair and changing system settings is a synch. I don't know about any of you, but a decade later I still cant remember where many of Windows billion configuration settings are stored in control panel. In OS X everything is stored under twenty or so simple to identify headings and when in doubt the powerful search functionality is incredible. Vista may have made huge improvements over Windows XP's fundamentally useless search feature, however it is still light years behind the speed an flexibility that OS X has today.

I could go on forever about the quality of service provided by my MacBook, however I won't. This is by no means a "windows sucks, buy a mac" blog post, as I, more than many, understand that the apple tax is ridiculous and that for some people these systems are simply to expensive. At the very least consider something cheaper along the lines of the Mac Mini if you plan to buy a low powered desktop machine as the change in experience is light and day, or if nothing else, do me a personal favor and boycott Dell...



Left to right: VMWare running Windows Vista, Western Digital 500GB MyBook for Time Machine, 17" HannsG monitor displaying OS X. Two keyboards and one mouse because you can never have enough things to type on! (click to see full size image)

"The built in software alone would be worth extra for, with such quality packages as iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band making things that took hours to do on Windows so much simpler."

Technically, they are extra as they are part of the iLife(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILife) suite of applications. You get this with every new Mac so it's easy to mistake, but boy do you notice it if you fall through a hole and don't install them.

iMovie I particularly love - despite its maddening usability problems (people with the current iLife can downgrade here - http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html). It's simply the bee's knees when it comes to making WoW boss-slaying videos.

It's also fun to try to tell Windows users that you can burn ISO files right out of the box - I gather that's only being new in Windows 7 ;-)