5 Months Later: I’m still on a Mac and loving it

I bought my Apple iMac 5 months ago. I have never used a Mac before my cur­rent one. It has always been some vari­a­tion of crappy old Win­dows (2000, XP, Vista).

The rea­son­ing for includ­ing “5 Months Later” in the title (and the fancy image to your right →) is because no com­puter I’ve ever owned has lasted me longer than 5 months, until my Mac. I usu­ally run like a lot of pro­grams at once some­times (Pho­to­shop, iTunes, IM, Text Edi­tor, FTP etc.) when I am work­ing, and obvi­ously crap like that will put a lo of stress on your com­puter (espe­cially if it’s a crappy XP laptop).

The death of my 2 old laptops

In 1 year, I’ve had 2 dif­fer­ent com­put­ers (both lap­tops). One run­ning XP, the other run­ning Vista.

Early days on XP

When I had my XP lap­top, that was when I first started get­ting inter­ested in the whole web design­ing stuff (not blog­ging). I ran an out­dated copy of Pho­to­shop from my step dad on it, and I remem­ber stay­ing up until like 5AM once just mess­ing with it because I was pretty fas­ci­nated with it. Coda is the most expen­sive app I bought with my own money, but it’s worth every dol­lar I spent on it.

That com­puter didn’t last me very long because it burned out or some­thing like that. One day I tried to turn it on, and it wouldn’t go. It was pro­nounced dead at the scene basi­cally is what I’m get­ting at here.

Vista lap­top; the heartbreaker

My other lap­top run­ning Vista (loved it to death) burned out as well. I don’t even remem­ber what the com­puter model it was, but it was awesome.

This was the lap­top where I basi­cally learned more web design and what the heck blog­ging was too. I started my first real attempt at a blog (a blog about blog­ging. Noticed a trend?) and really got a great idea of the whole blog­ging thing. But, like my last lap­top — it couldn’t han­dle what I was doing on it and didn’t turn on one day.

I actu­ally found a pic­ture of the desk­top some­where on the Inter­net if you want to see (click on the thumbnail):

Yep, that had all of my stuff on it. It had design work, writ­ings, and most impor­tant of all (this is why it’s the heart breaker) — pic­tures of some­one I was very close to. All of it was gone, and I had none of it backed up for some rea­son beyond me. Learned my lesson.

I get my Mac. Com­puter prob­lems solved?

So obvi­ously I am not very lucky with com­put­ers as you can see from the above paragraphs.

Once my Vista lap­top broke, I was with­out a com­puter of my own for about 2–3 months. Luck­ily it was around sum­mer time, so I took a bit of a “hia­tus” if you will from all this web design/blogging stuff and just enjoyed my sum­mer vaca­tion. Sure, I missed blog­ging and design­ing — but it gave me time to save up (as in get a job in my dads restau­rant) for the per­fect computer.

I real­ized that most bloggers/designers all have Macs, and I had been eye­balling the Apple web­site on my old lap­top look­ing for the Mac I wanted. I decided I was going to get a Mac and hope that it would be the last com­puter I needed for a very long time.

Today, I still have my Mac. I have spent some money on buy­ing the right apps to make it even bet­ter, and now I can­not imag­ine work­ing on any other com­puter unless a Mac. So, are my com­puter prob­lems solved? For now, yes. I doubt my com­puter will be going any­where since it’s a desk­top, and it’s got a spark plug so power out­ages don’t mess it up.

Why I love my Mac

To be more spe­cific than “I can­not imag­ine work­ing on any other com­puter unless a Mac”: Why do I love this Mac?

• It’s going to last me a long time.
• All of the apps I have to design/develop with are 100 times bet­ter than the ones I worked with on my Win­dows computer.
• The graph­ics are phenomenal.
• OS X is easy to use. The sim­plic­ity of the computer’s oper­at­ing sys­tem made the tran­si­tion from Win­dows to OS X a lot easier.
• Um…apparently your sex appeal goes up when you have a Mac?
• Macs look so damn pretty on your desk, mak­ing your room look pretty too.

This is a bit of an old pic­ture of my desk with my Mac on it, but it still looks fine (again, click the thumb­nail for full view):

Wouldn’t you want one of those bad boys sit­ting on your desk? I know I would (ah wait, I think I do).

My favorite Mac apps

Kind of an exten­sion to “Why I love my Mac”. I have a few apps that I use just about every time I turn on my machine.

Coda

Coda is my most used app besides my web browser because it is just about any web devel­op­ment tool you need in one appli­ca­tion. An FTP, Text Edi­tor, a Finder type nav­i­ga­tor, web browser for pre­view­ing your work, and plenty of other goodies.

App­Storm did a really good review of Coda here.

Text­Mate

Text­Mate is a really good (prob­a­bly the best) text edi­tor for Mac. It is much more pow­er­ful than the text edi­tor in Coda, and has a bunch more options to help make the cod­ing expe­ri­ence a lot more orga­nized and seam­less. Text­Mate also costs money (about $50 USD), but it’s worth it if you’re seri­ous about get­ting a GOOD text editor.

Adobe Pho­to­shop CS4

Costs an absolute for­tune, but Pho­to­shop is some­thing a seri­ous web designer can­not work with­out. It has got to be one of the most pow­er­ful image edit­ing soft­wares around (that’s not another Adobe prod­uct). I was extremely lucky and for­tu­nate to always have a copy of Pho­to­shop to work with in my “web adven­tures”. Check it out if you can afford it, seriously.

Won­der­ful Mac resources

With such a great com­puter comes a lot of great resources. Here are a few mac resource sites I fol­low and get Mac stuff from.

• MacHeist
  An amaz­ing web­site, a lot of apps that are usu­ally paid are given out for free. Join a team, earn more free apps and all this other stuff. A really cool site, got a lot of free apps there.
• The Unof­fi­cial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
  A blog for all things Apple, but if you’re a Mac user then you will want to fol­low their Mac 101 guide. A lot of use­ful infor­ma­tion on this blog like rumors, tuto­ri­als, sneak peaks and more.
• App­Storm
  A new blog from Envato, this blog does a lot of reviews of Mac apps, and other Apple related things.

Might have got­ten ahead of myself…

Wrote a lot more infor­ma­tion than I planned! No wor­ries though, every­thing I just wrote is why I love my Mac. Maybe I helped you find some cool resources for your Mac.

So let me know — what’s your favorite thing about your Mac? How long have you had yours? Has it been your favorite com­puter you have ever had?

Tagged as: Apple, imac, mac