On Saturday my wife, as part of a birthday gift from her sister, got a Regal Cinemas gift card and a promise to watch our two daughters.  We cashed in on this gift and were grateful for the window of freedom that doesn’t come around as often for obvious reasons.  An even better feeling was only paying a total of 50 cents since the gift card covered the cost of two matinee tickets and food and drink.

I noticed there was a new Apple Store at the mall we were at and since I was researching Macs pretty heavily the past month, we stopped in.  Without boring you with the details, the 50 cents I spent on movies and food was a drop in the bucket since we walked out of the Apple Store with a new Macbook!  We were going to buy one within the next year but realized that it made sense for us to get it now while Megan was still in grad school.  So the date went from a 50 cent excursion to one that cost a bit more than that!

As a lifelong Windows user, this is a huge jump.  It’s a whole new world to explore and requires the unlearning of a lot of techniques the folks in Redmond have trained the world to do.  For the longest time, there were two barriers for me ever even considering buying a computer from Apple.

1 - Cost.  When you compare Macs with PCs, the price is completely comparable now.  This wasn’t the case even a few years ago.  You get a stable machine that is less vulnerable to attacks (or at the very least there are fewer attempts at attacking Apple’s OS) and get a lot of included software that costs extra if you buy a Windows-based machine.

2 - Compatibility.  In the olden days, Mac users were really limited as far as software releases go.  Everything was made for Windows and Mac users got a lot of scraps.  This wasn't the case for musicians and graphic designers, as Macs have always been the superior system for those vocations, but for everything else you were almost forced to be a Windows user.  No longer!

So now we’re a Windows-free, wireless household and we couldn’t be happier about it.  There are the little things (non-application-wise) that Mac does better such as booting up in less than 30 seconds.  One thing I never liked was the electronic “churning” sound a machine would make as it’s processing with all the power it had.  With a Macbook, I can’t hear a thing. 

Much like those rock stars or Hollywood actors or athletes who make a sudden change from ingesting every kind of drug to being a hardcore religious nut in the space of a week, I have made the sudden change from being captive to Windows to worshipping at the altar of Steve Jobs within days.

Bye bye, Windows.  Don’t let the door hit ya where the dog should’ve bit ya.