Bob’s Blog

I have been debating, for quite some time now, about making “the switch” to OSX from Windows. This isn’t because of OSX at its core, believe it or not… it’s because of the hardware. The MacBook line of laptops are, in a word, gorgeous.

However, they’re costly. It’d cost me roughly $1600 to upgrade to the 13″ MacBook with a Windows license.

That’s a lot of frickin’ money for just an all-aluminum chassis of awesomeness.

I suppose I could switch to OSX and make it worth the monetary upgrade, but I play a ton of games on the PC and OSX just isn’t in the same gamespace as Windows is, so I don’t. If it wasn’t for that, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Everything that Windows has, I could do on OSX:

• E-mail (all done online via Firefox, which is available on OSX)
• Internet (see above statement)
• Music (either streaming through Firefox or iTunes, except for my Zune software, but I’d still have my home PC for that, at least for now)
• Music and Video production (Garageband and iLife apparently are good and it comes stock with OSX, plus I’d Dual Boot, so I’d still have my Windows programs)
• Word processing (OpenOffice is a free download, plus Office is available on the Mac)

The ONLY thing that OSX can’t do is games. All of the “hardcore” games I play are on PC and if I was to get a MacBook laptop, I’d use it for personal work stuff, which is all PC based. I can use BootCamp, but I’d want to format the Windows partition NTFS so I could have files over 4gb, but I could only have a 32gb partition, otherwise the FAT32 partition of OSX would have issues. On top of that, OSX can read, but not write, to NTFS without a $70 program and I’m not sure I want to bank $1600 on chance.

The nice thing is if I decide that OSX and the Mac aren’t for me, Macs have insane resale value and since I take uber good care of my stuff, I could easily sell it for $100 less than what I got it for and still be okay. I don’t exactly want to spend $100 to rent a Mac for a month, but maybe that’s what I need to decide if I want to go OSX or not. I do love my iPhone and the OS is basically a modified version of OSX.

The other reason (okay, there’ s more than one) I’ve been considering switching to Mac is because I want a lightweight, but yet solidly built laptop that’s not just a piece of plastic that’ll break in under 2 years. I have checked all the Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple laptops and, by far, the Apple has THE BEST parts and design for laptops that I’ve seen, hands down. On top of that, the hardware inside the Dell and HP laptops just aren’t right for some of the machines for what I need.

I really want a netbook, but they don’t have good video cards in them yet. The only one that does, the Asus N10J-A2, is over $700 and I don’t see it coming down in price any time soon. On top of the high price, it’s all plastic, has no internal DVD drive and has a slow Intel CPU that won’t last more than a year for what I want it to do. Do I really want to pay $750+ for that? No. Do I want to pay $1600 for a MacBook? No, but I can justify that easier because it’ll last MUCH longer than a netbook would. If it’d last 2x longer than a netbook, then it’s already paid for itself. Then again, most standard netbooks are $400 and dropping in price every day as new tech is being released. The ION (Intel Atom CPU + Nvidia Geforce GPU that’s in the MacBook) chipset will hopefully be out this summer, but nothing has been set yet; it’s all rumor right now.

Dell sells a few 13″ models, but they all have issues:

• Inspiron 13: Intel integrated graphics. No-go for gaming.
• Studio XPS 13: Could work, but it’s plastic with leather accents… not attractive. The other problem is the only hard drive available that’s not a SSD is a 500gb SATA 5400rpm drive. Replaceable, but a pain and at an added cost. Oh, and Vista is on there by default with no way to downgrade to XP. No thank you. One Vista box in my house is enough.
• XPS M1330: SSD only. No HDD option of any speed. SSD is a no-go for me at this point until the technology gets better.

I also checked Lenovo and I don’t like the look of them. Same with HP.

I was thinking about maybe buying one off of Craigslist if the price is right, but I hesitate because you never know what you get. I know that 90% of the people on CL just want to sell stuff for money, but knowing my luck, I’ll get the 10% “other” category and get f’d. No thank you.

So where does this leave me? Well, I’m considering a 13″ MacBook for $1600 so I can run Windows. That just doesn’t sound cost effective. I want a 10″ netbook, but I have no idea when a netbook will be released with ION or a nice GPU that doesn’t cost $750.

I think I’m left with a big ol’ “meh”. I don’t want to run out and buy a $1600 MacBook, but I don’t have any ideas of what to do any time soon.

Just to throw out another kink in the decision making process, Windows 7 will be released this Summer and I’m very, very curious to see how much better it is than Vista. Maybe that will be the final straw?