My Switch to Apple
Make that… my gradual swith to Apple laptop hardware.
My wife’s Dell laptop is officially dead. The socket that the power adaptor plugs into doesn’t seem to provide power to the motherboard. We tried several other power cord/adaptors. I assumed there was some loose connection or cracked solder point. We even went so far as to open the laptop, take just about everything out (including the motherboard), and couldn’t see any physical problem that we could fix. On to plan B.
I had speced out two comparable notebooks from both Dell and Apple. Normally I wouldn’t consider Apple simply because I don’t have any experience with Mac OS, and I’ve always thought Apple hardware was much more expensive. With Apple’s decision to go with Intel, it’s now possible to run Microsoft Windows on a Mac! That solves the first issue… Now the decision really comes down to price.
I speced out the same hardware at both Apple.com and Dell.com; an Intel 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo powered notebook with 1GB RAM and an 80GB hard disk. To my surprise, the Dell and Apple were virtually the same price! The Apple MacBook actually came in ahead of the Dell Inspiron because it included a DVD/CD burner combo drive while the Dell I speced didn’t include a burner. Also, the Apple came with a 3-year AppleCare protection plan. I had to take the Dell warranty down to 1-year to get a comparable price. All in all, the Apple won.
My wife and I proceeded to the local mall which happened to have both a Dell and Apple store. The Dell store ended up being just a kiosk with a few models — very uninspiring. On to the Apple Store. If you’ve never been to one, you should go just to see. It’s very clean and bright inside. There are always helpful employees ready to help. Most of them had some sort of iPod around their neck, attached to their nametag, or strapped to their arm somehow. I inquired about running Windows on a Mac, even though I already knew it was possible with both Boot Camp and Parallels. I just wanted to see how the Apple Store employees would respond. They were eger to show a demonstration of Parallels and explain the pros and cons of Parallels vs. Boot Camp. They even said Boot Camp would be integrated into the next version of Mac OS and will be supported once it comes out of beta. Very cool!
The process of buying a Mac is actually quite simple. There are very few choices. It basically comes down to processor, hard drive size, amount of RAM, and type of optical drive. The employee went to the back and grabbed one for us to purchase. With a student discount of $100, the cost came out to be $1,450 including a 3-year warranty and tax. Not bad at all for the latest and greatest hardware.
The next steps were to set up Boot Camp, install Windows, and finally restore all of the programs, documents, and other various settings (like bookmarks in Firefox, etc). Setting up Boot Camp was surprisingly simple. After burning a Macintosh drivers CD, it created a Windows partition and then asked for the Windows XP CD. Windows installed flawlessly and rebooted — into Windows! Crazy!
We purchased a slick looking external USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure for the old Dell’s hard drive — it matches the new MacBook. We now have a 30GB backup solution in addition to an easy way to copy all of the documents and settings onto the MacBook.
The one depressing part of the whole operation was having to install all kinds of security software for Windows XP while Mac OS X is secure out of the box. Windows Vista goes a long way to address these issues. I’ll let time be the judge of that.