I’m posting this comment 4 years after I first wrote it – exhuming it, so to speak, from the archives. Here’s the point. It was only 4 years ago that moving to Apple was seen as a risky thing to do. I remember encountering raised eyebrows when, 6 months after writing this, I actually did go out and buy the iMac I’d been salivating over.

I’m not sure if I’m witnessing a trend, but quite a few people I know have recently made the move from Windows PCs to Apple PCs. I intend to do the same the next time I change kit, but I’m slightly different in that I’ve never owned an Apple. All the people I’m talking about here have been Apple users, and are now moving back as a consequence of simply noting that Apple seems to be a revitalised company, OS X looks very impressive and the office apps on Apple are no longer a problem.

This trend, if it is one, is not yet visible in Apple revenues, but I’ve decided to keep track of them to see. Apple continues to innovate. Its most recent announcement is Blue Tooth enabled keyboard and mouse. It led with wireless LANs and WIFI and now it is first to the market with Blue Tooth enabled devices. If anything Apple is actually more innovative than it used to be and it rarely makes product blunders (as for example, the Apple Newton).

(originally posted to IT-Director.com where my blog used to reside).

The Consequences…

Since that time, by the way, I’ve bought 4 Apple computers and a collection of Apple software, Apple wireless devices and an Apple Time Machine.

Having bought a 20″ iMac, I quickly concluded that it would be a long time before I ever reverted to Windows. There was a learning curve, sure, but after a few weeks the positive side of Apple clicked in. It was easier to use and it never gave me a Blue Screen. You forget about it after a while, but I regularly lost days and days to Windows. I lose time with the Mac too, when things go wrong, but not in the way I did with Windows. Windows was fragile and the Mac is not.

Once I had an iMac I quickly got an Apple laptop and then I got a bigger Apple laptop and then my wife took over the iMac and I spent a great deal of money on a Deskpro with a 30″ screen. I’d come to realize that screen size delivers productivity. The “spaces” capability under OS X gives you 16 different desktops. I use them all for different activities. You have to work like this for a while to understand how productive it can be.

Time Machine As An Exemplar

Apple’s Time Machine offers a good lesson in Apple technology. The Time Machine is a devoted backup device with the associated Time Machine software running in OS X. You can use your own hard drive or buy the Apple one.

Apple doesn’t do documentation well so you’re never quite sure that you’ve set something up correctly, but usually you have because there are few choices to make. But for me, the Time Machine didn’t work well out of the box.  I set it up and I could find it on the network, but whenever it ran it killed the network with traffic, and then it simply didn’t load data quickly. I scanned the web to see if other buyers were having problems and I discovered they were. I unplugged it and forgot about it because I was busy. Then about two weeks ago I plugged it back in and it immediately requested a firmware upgrade, which I let it load. After that it just worked fine. I would have been better waiting 6 months before buying it.

With Apple, 1.0 releases can be quirky and less than perfect, but Apple fixes things soon enough. Time Machine is a truly sane backup capability. You fit and forget and it does incremental backups every hour for every Apple box you’ve got. My only beef with it is that I run Apple’s Aperture and it is better to use Aperture’s vault for backing up photos than the Time Machine.

And Now

I’m heavily invested in Apple technology now, so I’m not likely to switch out for years. In any event I have Windows (XP) running under Parallels on the Deskpro, so if I ever need Windows I’ve got it. Most of the application problems I suffer are from technology written fro Windows running on the Mac. The Mac enforces a kind of consistency in the way that software works and most software authors abide by it. But, sadly, Adobe doesn’t and neither does Microsoft.