Switchback…

I’ve made the switch back to using a Windows laptop after being a loyal Powerbook/iBook owner for the last 4 years (got my 12″ powerbook senior year as soon as it came out). I made the switch primarily for work reasons, including:

  • Significantly reduced cost, a Dell D620 w/ dock and Windows XP & Office license is $2000 vs. $2500 for a MacBook Pro. Throw in the cost of a 3-year warranty and 2 GB of RAM (both included in the $2k price point) and the Mac’s price reaches nearly $2900.
  • Mac OS X doesn’t have the best Java support, Eclipse is just slower in OS X than either Linux or Windows even on Intel hardware.
  • Similar battery life - PCs have finally caught up in this arena, I can get 4.5 hours on a 6-cell battery on the D620.
  • Reasonable tools exist in Windows (see below) such that many of the productivity gains I got on my Mac are now possible in Windows.
  • iTunes + Quicktime on Windows are pretty good, plus I always have my iPod with me so I’m not as reliant on my iBook to produce my iLife.
  • Fairly thin/lightweight - no where near Apple’s industrial design - but otherwise reasonable.
  • Has a trackpoint, much like on ThinkPads, so I don’t have to deal with a crappy touchpad.

So what do I miss about my Mac?

  • No Unix. This sucks.
  • Not nearly as sexy, let’s face it I’m not going to pick up any techno-chics in a coffee shop sporting my Dell laptop.
  • Feel like I’ve joined the dark side…

It’s sad to see a product I’ve depended on for years leave my life. I still have and will continue to use my G5 w/ Apple Cinema Display (until they steal it back from me). So my iLife is not really over - I can still use all the excellent media applications that Apple ships with OS X (iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, etc). Moreover, I get the best of both worlds in that I can now run Yahoo! Music Unlimited at home as well as iTunes to listen to whatever I want.

Here are some tools I’ve found to make my Windows laptop more like my Mac laptop:

  • AppRocket - a LaunchBar clone for windows. Open any app, doc, etc. with a simple alt-space bar and the first few letters of the app’s name. Not as advanced as Spotlight, but see below.
  • WinPlosion - like Mac OS X’s Exposé. Includes all the windowing enhancements as well as hot-corner support.
  • Google Desktop - just double-tap the ctrl button and you get Spotlight features for all the document, web history, chat logs, etc. on your machine.

Is this equivalent to the superior experience that my iBook provided? I think the jury is still out on that - it’s clearly not as intuitive and easy to use (why are there 2 different apps to control my wireless settings), things don’t “just work” and it’s missing a number of applications out of the box that make Mac’s so incredible. I don’t think a Windows PC can ever catch-up to the integration that you get on a Mac - however if some companies get their way (e.g. Google) it won’t matter because you’ll have web-based tools to do everything you’d want. This experience has convinced me that there is a market opportunity for Google to build excellent productivity applications (clones of iCal, Mail.app, Pages, iPhoto, even iMovie) on the web and build a very large user-base around them. Coming from a Mac background, it’s hard to really understand that 95% of the computer-using world doesn’t have such a tightly integrated set of tools at their disposal.

I think I’d have seriously considered a MacBook (black of course) if they just had better graphics - my company’s application is GPU intensive so the built-in Intel graphics wouldn’t have sufficed. The price-point on the other hand is pretty damn good compared to the MacBook Pro.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Switchback…,” an entry on Aki’s Blog

Published:
05.27.06 / 3pm
Category:
Tech Goodness, My Life, My Work