The Switch

My first computer was a Commodore 64 but since then I have always been a PC guy. Why? Well, they were the cheapest and the most versatile… I owned my first PC 21 years ago (DOS and eventually Windows 3.1). Since my first PC I have had many variants of the PC. The timeline (or stages) of PC ownership has always been the same.

Year 1 - Thrilled: Happy that I didn’t spend a HUGE amount of money but managed to get good performance. Later in the year you upgrade the RAM and maybe the video card.

Year 2 – Denial: Your computer begins crashing fairly often and you begin to have issues with disk space (for unknown reasons). You check for virisus, delete everything you can, take off programs, and run system clean up after clean up. But, hey this is still a great computer right? You begin to search websites on occasion looking for a new one.

Year 2.5 – Realization: This is the realization that your PC is in full “Windows Flail” mode. Constant crashing (blue screens), no disk space (don’t know why), simple programs take forever to load and are buggy at best. The fans begin to make noise and system tools to help improve your computer just don’t work anymore. Finally, you reformat your heard drive and clean install the operating system.

Year 3 – Waiting for Trash Run Thursday: If you have made it this far you are on the verge of a nervous breakdown if you ever have to do work on the computer. The clean install worked for a few months but it passes quickly. You buy another computer and you start the cycle back at Year 1. The old computer gets stripped of any usable parts and tossed in the trash.

I am trying to break the cycle.

I used to look down at Mac users because they had systems that couldn’t run EVERYTHING (I was mostly concerned with games). I would laugh and talk about how inferior their operating systems were and how much faster my processor was. Here was the deal… They always seemed to hold onto the same computer for a very long time. Being a photographer I also noticed that most of the professional photographers I followed used Macs. I started the research and quickly realized that from a photographer’s perspective the Mac platform stands above the rest. I use the computer for one primary purpose and that is post processing my images. You guessed it… I bought an iMac 27”. No, I can’t play all the games I used to but that is why we have console systems. I would say the photographic processing performance of the Mac is as good as (maybe a little better) an equivalent PC but I am hoping that at the Year 3 stage I will not be waiting for the trash to run. Stay tuned for some photography specific reviews as it relates to the Mac platform.