My New Computer
It’s not a Mac! It’s a Sony!
A Sony Vaio E-Series to be exact.
Yes, I’ve gone back to the dark side. But it doesn’t feel that way anymore. I’ll make a long story short, since I’ve started out to write a long explanation of why I’m going back to Windows, and I think the less said, the better. I started out on Commodore machines and eventually made it to PCs. I used PCs since the early 90’s with Windows 3.0. Was always happy with them. Did the Mac thing for 3 years, and it was great, but I’m a bit disillusioned with Apple right now.
Again, I don’t want to go into senseless details, but I will say that it has a lot less to do with Flash CS5 and 3.3.1 than you might think. I was never a big supporter of the push to get Flash onto the iPhone in the first place, as you can see here. And last October I expressed my doubts over the Flash CS5 to iPhone publishing route. So before anyone accuses me (again) of being a whiny Flash developer, forget it. It’s overall about the general direction that Apple is going in, in both their attitude towards those who develop for their platform, and their insistence on overprotecting their consumers. As someone tweeted recently, “Balmer: ‘Developers! Developers! Developers!’ Jobs: “Developers?’“ I am not starting a boycott or any kind of movement against Apple, and I’m under no illusion that my switching is going to have any impact whatsoever on Apple’s policies. I just didn’t feel good personally working on my Mac as of late, and feel more comfortable working on a PC right now.
I have to say that Windows 7 is a nice OS. I’ve worked with just about every flavor of Windows from 3.0 up to XP. I skipped ME and Vista. But 7 has some really nice features, looks good, and already feels like home. One thing about the PC platform is that it’s all about choice. Maybe too much choice. Just deciding what model machine to get was a tough process. Took me a couple of weeks to come up with a decision. But my wife had a Vaio a few years back and I really liked it. I shopped around a lot, got lots of suggestions, tried many models in various stores, read lots of reviews and spec lists, and watched lots of Youtube reviews. But I’m happy with the Sony. It looks good, feels good, nice and snappy. The base model wasn’t even that expensive, so I fitted it up with the biggest fastest hard drive, best video card, and highest CPU they offered. Still just came to around $1000.
I’ve been having fun digging up old programs and utilities that I used to use a few years back. Finding that some of my old serial numbers still work 3 years later! Owning a PC also tends to mean knowing a lot more about the internals of your machine – both the hardware and how everything works, drivers, etc. I guess to a lot of people that is a pain in the neck, but it was also one of the things that I used to really enjoy about computing. The hacker mentality. Relearning a lot of that old stuff as I go along too.