I decided to try out two new Apple devices a few months ago.  The main points of this was not to upset my local group of cronies who are somewhat “all things PC and not fruit”, but to simply upgrade my current PC to newer hardware.  I’d heard of other folks trying this and repaving the initial Lion or Snow Leopard image with Windows7, but I had a few things in mind: I wanted to shift the way I used a laptop, specifically one with fewer buttons and one with (IMHO) superior graphics and display; I still wanted to keep a Windows7 image on the machine; I wanted my music and photography to follow me around instead of putting some pics over here, and then some over there.

Sure, there’s a slew of gestures and key combinations to learn but the last time I had to learn a keyboard I was in typing class in high school, so my brain is enjoying the attention and exercise at the moment.

Two good friends (also coders) have been using Apple machines (and phones) for a while, who I used as resources to ask specific questions about the configuration a.k.a. features to add at buy time, and how to run Windows7 as well since my day job still requires some coding tools that only run on Windows.  They’re smart guys so I trust them and they were right.  It has been a blast so far, and moving back and forth from the MBP and the HP hasn’t been terrible but I do find myself mashing on the track pad on my HP laptop and obviously nothing happens.

A good friend of mine told me this one time, “if you want to work, use a PC; if you want to play, use a Mac”.  He was right. Totally.  Now that I used my MBP for both work and play things seem more normal, not sure what word to use there, but maybe you get it.  At any rate its been a great journey so far, the hardware is awesome, the graphics are clean and crisp, and there’s no shortage of help when I’m trying to figure things out.  The thing that probably sticks out in my mind the most is the amount of time I don’t wait for the laptop to startup and shutdown.  I’ve probably saved about 12 days of my life since December not waiting for things to start and stop.  I was glad to wait in the old days, now I’m a bit less patient, and I like it better when things are more snappy.

I also recently purchased an iPad.  The main driver for this was to have face-time with daughters and their kids since there’s a lot of distance between FL and OH.  The face-time so far has been awesome, and it’s great connecting randomly with my girls.  I also discovered so many apps to help organize me.  Most notably are Remember the Milk, and FlipBook.  Other apps that stream things are more of a distraction during go-time so I won’t list those, but I will say that there’s probably no reason to continue buying music when some many applications can stream it.

FlipBook really does a fine job of collating all of the blogs I read (7 total); plus it connects all the other social stuff too which is nice but not necessary – and its free.  All of my magazine subscriptions have companion applications as well, this means I don’t have to stop reading, oh, and all of the eBooks and PDFs I stuff into DropBox are available too and they read like I’m using a giant Kindle; I can’t read outside but if I’m outside I probably won’t have a book in my hand anyway.  I still like books.  I have a lot of them, so I don’t see myself replacing that experience with an iPad.

All of the other usual stuff is basically the same, the PC could do the same as the iPad or MBP; there are some nicer trade-offs though but I’m really enjoying this change so far.  A lot!