Two Years On; And The Date Is Still Strong

Owning a Mac was a long cherished dream of mine. Like many other dreams, it was beyond my reach. But dreams do come true.

As soon as I became an independent consultant, I bought myself a MacBook Laptop. Yes it was expensive, but that is one of few purchases that I am not sorry about.

Reasons?

Due to nature of my assignments, I had to use my laptop only on an open network. But so far, I didn’t have to worry about virus creeping to my laptop. I freely use thumb-drives for sharing files with all others Ms-Windows users without any care or concern. I do have an anti-virus installed; yet the assurance of safety in itself is a great relief.

Secondly, in these many days, I haven’t wasted an hour of downtime due to system crash, failed updates or hanging system for thousand and one reasons. Efficiency is implicitly expected out of consultants and being an IT consultant, I am glad that I never had to say, “please give me one more day since I have to re-install my computer” (though I had to hear that from many of my colleagues).

Another advantage of Mac is the pleasure of using better designed products. I can’t comment if this differentiation is brought forth by designers of applications or MacOS itself somehow mandates a pleasing UI and a well functioning design; in any case, Mac users benefit from such application ecosystem. One such feature that is ‘full screen editing’ by which you are presented a full screen canvas with minimalist tools, thus helping you to concentrate on creating the content rather than being diverted by umpteen number of tiny icons scattered all over the screen. I am not saying all Mac users are highly productive - I can’t even say that about myself, but these applications facilitate productivity and then gets out of your way.

Is it all only admiration? Of course not. I am not a Mac zealot to be blinded. There are some black-spots too in Mac.

Foremost is the lack of wide spread customer service centres, at least in India. There are only handful of service centres, (though they were extremely helpful), and then there are absolutely none in tier-2 cities.

And then there is this, common complaint that anything to do with Mac is very expensive. There is definitely a premium to be paid for all the features in Mac, be it hardware, MacOS applications or third-party applications. They are more expensive than their counterparts in Windows machines.

But these gripes are small compared to what I get out of owning a Mac.

I will continue to enjoy the pleasure of being with a Mac.