I’m a Mac

On Friday, my shiny new iMac arrived in the mail. Joy! (I joked on Twitter that I bought it because I was bored during last Tuesday’s presidential debate, but that’s not actually true — well, not the part that I bought it because I was bored, anyway.) I spent the rest of the weekend playing with it and generally ogling how pretty it is, how simple it is, how easy it is to use, and how freaking awesome the bright 24″ display is. Though it will eventually have a permanent home on my desk in the study, it’s currently sitting front and center on my dining room table!

It is awesome.

Until my laptop gives out, I’ll be a dual Mac-PC person, using my Dell laptop when I need something portable but doing all my graphics and web work — which for the past three years has been done on my laptop — on the iMac.

My switch to Mac is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long, long time. Though I have been using Apple products for years — starting at Georgia Tech when I was an editor for the school newspaper; all our layout work was done on a Mac — I’ve remained hesitant to switch despite my affinity for Apple’s simplicity and attention to user interface.
One reason is that I’m more comfortable with Windows. I’ve used it through enough versions of the OS that, for the most part, I know how to do everything I need to do, from setting up peripherals to changing system settings. But that was only a minor reason. After all, I’m certainly competent enough to learn my way around the Mac OS. (Not to mention that I’ve been using and enjoying other Apple products like the iPod and then iPhone.)

No, the single major reason I hadn’t switched up to this point was software. I own plenty of costly software, most notably the entire Adobe Creative Suite which I use on a daily basis, and each is a Windows edition. Sure, I know that Macs now have the ability to run Windows, both from startup via BootCamp and as an “OS within an OS” using third party virtualization packages. But if all I’m ever going to do with my Mac is boot it up with Windows then really, what’s the point? I saw absolutely no advantage in buying a Mac if all I planned to do was run a bunch of PC applications.

But my laptop is getting older and this semester as I started working with InDesign as part of my desktop publishing class, it quickly became apparent that the laptop was quickly losing the ability to keep up with my work. I added more memory a few months ago, but that didn’t make much of a difference. Also, doing a lot of design and graphics work on a 15″ screen pretty much sucks. I’m constantly squinting or pulling the laptop closer to my face to really inspect things at a fine level, and while it was workable, after three years it was certainly getting old. Then there was the fact that my class was using Adobe CS3, and then the company announced CS4…and suddenly it was the right time for me to upgrade to the newest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Since Macromedia was bought by Adobe, upgrading the suite also got me the newest versions of Dreamweaver and Flash.
So my hardware is getting creaky, and it’s time to update my software so…enter Apple.

Once I decided to finally make the jump, I thought long and hard about which model would best suit my needs. At first, I planned to simply replace my laptop with something comparable like the 15″ Macbook Pro (note that these decisions were all thought about prior to Tuesday’s Apple announcement that they are overhauling their laptop line). But this was hard to justify. If my reason for getting a new computer was power for graphics, it made more sense to get a desktop which would 1) have more processing power and 2) allow for a much larger display.

So a desktop, then, is what I wanted. I next checked out the Mac Pro line, which looks amazing. But at $2299 for the most bare bones (single processor) version — and that price doesn’t include a monitor, which is one thing I definitely wanted to improve if I was going to buy a new computer — there’s just no way I could justify the price involved in getting one of the Pro machines.

Finally I came back to the iMac line. I’d thought about them at the beginning, impressed by the 24″ iMacs that the UHCL computer lab recently bought for the graphics classroom, but I hesitated because they are all-in-one. Everything’s enclosed along with the monitor. Like iPods and iPhones, an iMac’s innards are difficult to access. What if I need to upgrade something? But as I thought about this, I realized that in all the years I’ve owned computers, there are only two things I’ve ever upgraded myself: hard drives and memory. The top-of-the-line iMac comes with a 500 GB hard drive, which is more than enough space. My current backup drive is only 500 GB and holds every single file I deem important with room to spare, and external hard drives are so cheap these days that even if I find that the 500 GB internal drive is full a couple years down the road, it won’t be a problem to move data elsewhere. (I mean, my laptop only has a 40 GB drive. 40! I basically live on external drives at the moment.) That left memory, which is the one thing on the iMac that is easily upgradable via a slot on the bottom of the machine.

So iMac it would be. I checked out the educational discounts and was planning to go that route (I’m going to cry when I finish my digital media master’s next year and lose that discount), but then Irwin suggested I check out the refurbished models as well. Bingo! I was able to get the current top-of-the-line iMac at a $300 discount, which put it right in the price range of what I’d pay for a laptop anyway.

Decision made. iMac bought.

And it is awesome so far.