I bought a Mac. I was going to make some long introductory paragraph since that’s what I do, but let’s cut the shit — I bought a Mac.

Here’s the deal. For the past year+, I have been using a 10″ Acer netbook as my only computer with an internet connection. Sure, I put together an i7-950 with 16GB of RAM for the studio and dumped thousands into other gear, but I am a rather simple guy otherwise and didn’t mind working on the tiny screen. After all, what am I REALLY doing with my computer at home, anyway? Email, Facebook, reading the news, streaming Beavis & Butthead when I’m exporting tracks late at night. I RDP into a lot of servers and do work from home sometimes, but really, it wasn’t that bad. Decent-sized keyboard and because everything was cloud-based except Google Chrome, speed wasn’t an issue.

I typed this long-ass explanation but nobody will find it as interesting as I do. Bottom line was that I was using this slow computer and didn’t give a shit. It died suddenly, my work PC was awful, I needed something with power to test shit in virtual environments, wanted to start doing web development again, and realized that I think Windows is quite shitty (but more on that later). I also wanted to learn another OS, considered a MacBook Air but its lack of ethernet killed me, so I went with a refurb MacBook Pro 13″ with an i5. Bumped the RAM to 8GB today and I am in good shape.

The reason this is kind of a big deal for me is because I have talked shit on Apple for quite some time. I feel like Apple is that old guy who wants you to think that he’s “down with the kids.” He’s that dude waaaay past his prime at the bar, the guy with the sunglasses and the ear rings who drives a Corvette and hits on young chicks. Probably works in the mortgage industry. He says “dude” a lot and it always sounds forced. That is how I see Apple. They have the money to be innovative and they spent a ton, a fucking TON, of time making sure that their image is presented just right, calculated to appeal to a certain audience, but at the end of the day, they are a fucking huge corporation that locks their hardware down in absurd ways, makes every effort to create proprietary adapters so the consumer is locked in, claims to be interested in helping people express themselves but offers a single color and body style for each of their products, dictates what you can install on their mobile device and censors the shit out of their app store, practically uses slave labor to build their products overseas… and smiles the whole time.

But you know what? That is the state of modern capitalism. As much as I would like to boycot every single company whose business practices I find objectionable, if I did that, I wouldn’t use… anything. I experimented with Ubuntu and as much as I would have loved to use it as my primary OS, there were odd quirks — installation issues, weird hardware incompatibilities, fewer software options than Mac — and these kept me from going all the way. Besides, people are stupid and want someone to tell them what to do. OS X is deceptively simple on the surface and appeals to that nature; under the hood, it seems that there might be far more that you can tinker with than in a Windows system, making it more powerful for those who want that.

Though they go about things differently, Microsoft is no better or worse than Apple when it comes to being slimey suits. If I’m going to buy a product from a shitty corporation, and I don’t exactly have a choice, I’m going to go with the one whose products fucking WORK. No computer is perfect — I managed to crash iTunes the first time I used it — but I have not had a single problem with this system since I got it, I have not noticed any weird slowdowns, no errors when installing or uninstalling applications. It is smooth, quiet, doesn’t get too hot. It came with Apache, PHP, and all sorts of wild shit preinstalled. I’m loving the power of the Terminal and getting to use and learn all kinds of *nix commands. The hardware is solid, the engineering is beautiful.

Keeping this blog really got me thinking about what I expect from technology. All my complaints about Windows, seeing traffic and comments and emails related to these absurd problems I’ve documented, and then combining this with my day-job in which I am paid good money to fix things that really shouldn’t break in the first place… It made me realize that, as I have said a few times, those of us who grew up with Windows have come to have such low standards for our computers that we are willing to put up with things that suck just because it’s what we’re used to. Apple, for all their smug, dishonest marketing, demands consistent, unparalleled quality from their technology, and that is why individuals and businesses are flocking to them.

So there you have it. Sold out. Still working in Windows during the day, using either a VM from within VirtualBox or my RDS server, but loving this OS otherwise. Managed to enable, break, and fix Apache the first night I had it. A Linux box is already setup as a VM, waiting for me to dive further down the rabbit hole, despite its quirks…

Learning constantly, pushing myself constantly, always demanding more. I would not have it any other way.