Several years ago, I was talking to my son about the MacBook Pro he was using. He was running Windows on it using one emulator or another. I asked him about the MacBook and he told me that the MacBook was the best Windows laptop he had used. That stuck with me.
When it came time to replace my “travel” machine, a Dell XPS 13 that had become non combos mentis, I decided to dip my toe into the Apple world. Well, dip my second toe.
The “kids” forced me into the Apple world several years ago when they insisted on buying an iPhone SE for me as a gift. They had an intense dislike for the midrange Motorola Android phones I had been buying and wanted me to join them on the other side of the wall. I did so, albeit reluctantly at the time. I now have a well-used, but still very reliable, iPhone 13 Pro.
But I did get used to the blue bubbles in iMessage. I liked how Siri would suggest sharing contact info with others. The battery life was pretty good.
I didn’t like it as much as my Blackberry. But when I say that, I feel like someone is telling me that their current car isn’t as good as their Edsel. It’s gone. Not coming back. And it’s dead for a reason – Blackberry’s arrogance when the iPhone was released, an arrogance I shared. We were both wrong, but at least I didn’t nearly kill my company. There are still things the Blackberry did either well or easily that neither Android nor Apple do well nor easily. They’re getting there, but they’re not there yet.
I digress. At the end of 2021, I purchased a MacBook Air. 13″ screen, 8 Gb of RAM and a 250 Gb hard drive. (Note to self – get more RAM and a bigger hard drive next time). It is light weight, fanless, so it runs quietly, and has a good screen and camera. The touchpad is large and has a variety of multi-touch commands that you get used to fairly quickly. I was doing fairly well with it.
I kept my Lenovo Thinkpad as my desktop machine, connected to a docking station and a 32″ monitor, but the MacBook traveled with me. The Lenovo was lovely, but it was beginning to show its age. It was running Windows 11 and it was constantly running the fan. It also started locking up on a regular basis, which was inconvenient. I reinstalled the OS several times, but things were just not going well.
The MacBook, on the other hand, ran quietly and didn’t lock up. I bought a real version of MS Office. I was able to replicate nearly everything the Lenovo had. And all my office-related systems, such as accounting, billing and phone system, were cloud-based. I had to get used to the Finder app and its vagaries, and that’s still a little bit of a work in progress.
I liked the MacBook so much that my next move was a Mac Mini, with the same RAM and storage configuration. I figured I would connect the Mini to the Lenovo docking station. The Mini and the docking station were not connecting to each other. I hooked up the HDMI from the monitor to the Mini and went on the prowl. Deep in the bowels of the internet, I found a link to software published by Cisco, of all things, that would make the two devices like each other. I installed the software and, boom, all was good.
But all was not good in the keyboard drawer. I had an ergonomic Microsoft keyboard that I liked, but the Mac keyboard layout is different. I found myself doing the wrong things with the wrong keys. There didn’t seem to be a way to easily convert the keyboard to Mac, so I bought the only Mac-specific ergo keyboard I could find, from a company called Macally. It isn’t great, but it works. I haven’t seen it since we left Florida in July.
After that was the mouse. The mouse worked OK, but I missed being able to do the task switching and other tricks that I could do on the MacBook. So I bought an unused Magic Touchpad from one of my neighbors, so now I can multi-touch to my heart’s content, when we are eventually reunited, as the touchpad is also in Florida.
At the moment, I am typing this on the MacBook using one of those USB-C external displays. It’s a 15-inch diagonal on a 16:9 form. so it’s kind of wide. But it gives me more real estate to work on, which comes in handy.
Eventually, I will be reunited with the Mini, the Macally keyboard, the touchpad and the big monitor. I’m kind of looking forward to that. In an upcoming blog, I’ll talk more about what it’s like being an Apple user in a primarily PC world. Let’s just say that it’s not as difficult as it used to be.