Switching

I think the turning point was when I saw a Sony Vaio laptop next to an Apple PowerBook in a department store. The Sony, although svelte, sexy and shiny in its own way, simply paled in comparison to the PowerBook. I mean, come on. The PowerBook is one inch thick. It's got a titanium skin. And, to top it all off, it ran OS X.

Sure, there was doubt. I've been weaned on Microsoft products all my life, ever since I can remember my dad carting home an IBM AT in the late eighties. Then, it was DOS all the way up to 6.22, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98SE, NT4, 2000 and XP. I remember mucking around with config.sys files, tweaking emm386 parameters, making boot disks that would be exceedingly funky with dos4gw. It was all very interesting. It wasn't really frustrating. I didn't particularly think that there was any other way for things to be. And--let me get you straight on this--it didn't feel that bad. I felt like I was learning lots. I guess I was, maybe.

One time (no, not at band camp), in an effort to get Wing Commander, or something or other, working on an old NCR 386 (it even had a 387 co-processor, but was badly stung with EGA graphics), I'd mistakenly done Very Bad Things to config.sys and didn't have any spare floppies to boot off. That got me in trouble. Apart from that, everything was a learning experience.

A few of my friends had Macs. They were normally used for word processing or desktop publishing. Sometimes, when I went round and played with them, they had little pictures of bombs on them. It was cute. I was told, back then, that although Macs were cute and could do fun stuff like record sound (they had microphones! You could actually record your own voice and it would play it back!), they were Bad because they Shielded You From Things. Back then, a computer that you didn't have to fight with to get to do what you wanted didn't really seem like a computer.

I grew up. I got on the net. The machines in our household began to accumulate, the NCR 386 was superceded by a 486, then a Pentium Pro, then a Pentium II, and then and then. I struggled with getting the relevant OSes to work (the Pentium Pro was a Dell model that came with NT4 preloaded and a SoundBlaster AWE64. It didn't work out of the box. At all. There were tech support calls to Dell in Ireland, who were dumbfounded but, in what still stands out as the best tech support I received ever, transferred me to tech support in the 'States until someone could work out the problem with me. That was fun.) - being the only competent techie in the house kind of thrusts you into that position.

Our family got on the 'net in 1994. I'd found out that my dad, an academic, was entitled to an account on his university's unix system and that they offered SLIP dialup. That was a no-brainer. There was trumpet winsock for a while, then TCP/Connect II (by Intercon, which has now bizarrely become an engineering and manufacturing corporation), then Windows 95 came on, which, the TCP/Connect II people reluctantly informed me, had its own TCP/IP stack and dialer. Oh well. Unix was fun. I think I learned how to use pine and tin around then. Then unix disappeared for a while, apart from occasional forays to chmod things that were promptly forgotten.

Then unix kind of came back. I got an account on a student server at university, and then ended up doing some work for my dad's university for a friend that involved us sticking Red Hat on a machine, messing around with samba, perl, mysql and apache. Linux was becoming trendy, and I wanted in.

2002. My domain was hosted on a box in someone's kitchen (Chris's domain seems to have vanished), and he refused to install pine, so I was forced to learn how to use mutt. Still not that much learning going on. Still, I really did want to pick up what little perl I'd forgotten, and gluing all these free sql database to perl and apache had given me some kind of rush.

Early this year, it was finally time to buy a laptop. The desktops in the house were all running Windows 2000 or XP, and I'd done my homework. It had come down to a Sony Vaio. Then I saw those two machines, the Vaio and the PowerBook next to each other. And I wanted the PowerBook.

I read, voraciously. No one would say anything that bad about OS X. Sure, it was slow. It'd get better. But it was gorgeous. And hey, there was all that BSD goodness lurking just under the lickable Aqua/CoreGraphics frontend. I could play with apache again. Perl 5.6 came preinstalled. If I got fink running, I could stick X11 on. Samba was only a compile away.

I bought the PowerBook. When the machine arrived, I'd probably sat in front of a Mac for less than five minutes in the entirety of my life. It was a big gamble. An expensive one. Those I knew who had switched--a friend who had switched from Windows and bought an iBook--were ecstatically happy.

I realised that things were somewhat different when, after booting up and installing OS X, I had tried to insert the Airport CD to get onto our wireless network. I didn't have to. It'd already been detected. I could already ping every other machine. I tried installing some software--it had come in some kind of disk image. Double click on the disk image. It bounced in the dock. I double clicked on the newly mounted disk. "Drag this into your Applications folder," it said. I did. That was it. It felt a bit weird.

A couple days later, I downloaded the source to Samba and tried to compile it. My unix knowledge could have been put on the head of a pin and a million angels still could've had room to dance. I followed the instructions I had, but they were somewhat vague, and amounted to "download samba, compile it, and then just change all the config file in /etc/samba/smb.conf". I did, and it didn't work. I ignored it for a while.

Office v.X finally arrived and was installed on the machine. Word is fine, apart from a few problems with using up around 1gb of swap. Excel X makes pinging noises every so often, but does the job. Entourage X is pretty, though it could do with acknowledging the existence of Outlook a little more than, say, going "lalalalala I can't hear you". I went back to getting Samba to work. It did, I'd just been a little thick about the whole process. That same day, Sulaco, the PowerBook, started showing up in the local workgoup and started leeching MP3s from my desktop.

I swapped shells to Bash, simply because I could, and every other unix system I'd used had used Bash as its shell. Oh. And all the cool kids were doing it too.

I tried learning Java, downloaded a book and attempted to install the JDK on an XP box. It didn't work. It didn't like XP. I just used javac on OS X instead. Last week, I started playing with Perl again to write some irc bots.

I found some instructions to start an imap server so I could migrate mail from Outlook on my XP box. It took around an hour to do. In retrospect, it was pretty easy.

I played with Fink for a while, and would've installed XFree86 for Darwin, only I'm on a narrowband connection that gets dropped every two hours. It's on my list of things to do.

I couldn't have done any of those things with a Vaio laptop. Well, maybe I could've wiped it and stuck Debian on it. But that wouldn't have been the point. Things wouldn't have worked. Or, I've been lead to believe that things would've been a lot harder to get working. Right now, I've got a one inch thick svelte machine that does everything perfectly and when I tell it to. It has a gorgeous UI that, minor niggles withstanding (what is it with a dock that will let you put applications behind it so you can't get at them again?) is a joy to use. iTunes is fun. iPhoto is fun. I want an iPod. Chimera is a wonderful browser.

My only reservation is, Apple hype be damned, this machine is a tad slow. Maybe Jaguar will help with that.

I love my Mac.

[More switch stories at Apple and O'Reilly]

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