Am I a Mac or PC?
December 2, 2009 | Advice for local companies, Tech Worth Talking About
Clearly, I’m a Mac.
But for the past 15 years, I was a PC.
I never even thought of switching to a Mac until I went out on my own and my husband convinced me to convert. Yes, I was dazzled by how beautiful of a machine it is and the iPhone was of course the smartphone of choice once I left my BlackBerry behind. It took awhile to learn the new OS, but once I got the hang of it, we added our own Apple network and backup system, and starting managing multiple accounts – I became a devoted fan.
Start up companies often contemplate which direction to go and what the major issues are with each. This post is not to convince you to change over to Mac – which by the way as an average price point of $2500/pp.
Quite the contrary. Steve Jobs may be a god and I hear he runs a tight ship over there in Cupertino. If you want to read something great, learn how Jobs starting shopping the iPhone and told many wireless service providers to go jump in a lake.
While we‚Äôre all dazzled by the Apple Store and convenience of iTunes, we have to remember that Apple doesn’t make many products — six Macs, variety of iPods, two iPhones, and a debatable-even-worth-it, Apple TV. Oh, plus accessories. A recent Forrester analyst made this point: ‚ÄúIf Apple tried to build a car, it would take it three years just to design the dashboard. Now it would be an extraordinary dashboard, but Job’s fabled micro-management would stall the delivery of a finished automobile.‚Äù
There are limitations for BtoB companies if they’re thinking of turning into a Mac shop. And this isn’t even about cost. The biggest problems with piecemeal approaches to your IT infrastructure is that at some point these systems won’t work flawlessly together. We even have problems working with a “Mac-friendly” Brother printer, consistently resetting itself because of difficulty working with our network and the Mac OS. That’s ok for us small shops, but for larger companies a printer or network breakdown can mean major loss in productivity.
As I mentioned, I was dazzled by the branding and simplicity of the machine. I look at Dell and HP laptops today and think ‚Äì ‚Äúthose bulky things.‚Äù And the PC product lines are trying harder and harder to be like Apple ‚Äì take the Dell Adamo line for example. At the heart of it, Apple designs for the consumer and the creative. There don‚Äôt have complex systems or IT problems. I also know developers love their Macs, but let’s face it — even internally at large enterprises the dev team works their own rules.
Jobs runs a highly specialized, super focused business on design and speed. It’s why he packages so many software elements into each Mac – he knows it will work and work the way he wants it to. That might always be the best fit for an enterprise.
This is my second Asus Eee PC and I love these little powerhouses. They do exactly what I need for them to do and even more–I’m a writer and editor–and take up very little space. I did my research before I bought one (the significant other is a tech geek and I trust his knowledge) and I liked what I discovered.
The Asus EecPC weighs nearly next-to-nothing and is super-portable, with many of the features of the larger and more high-end laptops. This is a great netbook for students (I bought one for my niece in high school). It came ready-to-run right out of the box. It’s also great for those people who want to get their feet wet but aren’t ready to spend a bundle for a system that’s more than they really need.
The first one I purchased was the 700 Series 4GB (gigabyte) model and though it ran Linux, that wasn’t a problem because it’s compatible with MS Office. I added an extra 4GB SDHC card and still have plenty of room left. I liked that these were solid-state machines–meaning no moving parts–because I tend to be hard on electronics being always on the move. The down side of the 700 Series was the tendancy to run a little warm and the relatively short battery life–about three hours.
Now I own this version and am in LOVE! Having the XP version has made my writing and editing tasks a pleasure and the larger screen–YAY!!! It boots up very fast. This one weighs a little more because of the 160GB hard drive, but compared to my HP Pavilion, it’s like comparing a plastic dinosaur to Godzilla. I’m still playing around with the various features and configuring it to my liking.
I don’t quite get the complaints about the size of the keyboard–have people looked at their cell phones and Blackberrys lately? I think I’m getting carpal tunnel in my thumbs from texting so much! I’m perfectly fine with the Asus’ keyboard size and find that I actually type faster on it.
My only complaint is a minor cosmetic one–I bought the shiny black and it’s a magnet for fingerprints–which is why I purchased the silicone sleeve a day or so later. I’m happy now.
Asus should be paying me because I’ve sold at least TEN of these to people while doing work on my commute. If anything, these computers are a real attention-getter and sometimes I find it hard to actually do any writing because people are always asking me about it.
I just installed on this baby 2GB of RAM and Windows 7 and it runs smooth and pretty. Very good looking notebook, battery life is outstanding. I have few products of samsung a and never been disappointed.
p.s.
yeah, there is no speakers there, just “headphones” kinda “speakers”.
Very low volume and no bass whatsoever…No problem though since I plug it into my stereo system and on the road I use headphones anyway.
I too was a PC for a long time, meaning 1984. And at IBM that eventually meant Windows and Lotus Notes. The difference for me since moving to a Mac in 2007 was that I don’t spend much time making my PC work. Fixing the OS is a thing of the past. My Mac lets me work.
So it costs more up front, and that cost gives me back time. Money always comes back to you … time is gone forever.