Take it to the Max

i-Mac(ed)

Finally, I took the plunge and converted from PC to Mac. (Some of my readers will probably mutter "It's about time!")  People liken the spiritual divide between devotees of the PC and Mac to Protestantism and Catholicism; to me it was more like a spiritual conversion from Christianity to Zen Buddhism. 

What put me over the edge was that the Windows operating system on my laptop, for some inscrutable reason, kept succumbing to the dreadful BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.  (Count yourself lucky if you've never experienced it.)  I put up with this daily torment, plus many other software nightmares, for as long as I could, since last July, until my Dell laptop finally quit for good.

What kept me from making the switch sooner was concern over the compatibility between the Mac and the various Autodesk programs which I'm wedded to for architectural design.  But given that Autodesk has begun to accommodate Mac users and make some of their programs compatible with the Mac OS, and given the availability now of software such as Parallels Desktop, which allows one to work in Windows programs without having to reboot, we were finally convinced that it would be safe for me to switch.  Kirk made the switch when he moved to IU two and a half years ago and has never looked back.

After having gotten over the initial difficulty of transferring the data from my old hard drive to the new iOS environment and installing various software programs for the Mac, I've begun to get the hang of the different terminology and different ways of navigating.  What I like best about this super machine is that the Mac operating system is integrated with the Mac's own impeccable and seemingly indestructible hardware and all its peripherals, unlike the Windows setup where its operating system lives in hardware made by others and which tends to go out of sync with operating system updates or simply fall apart in a few years' time.

I've yet to find out how Autodesk programs work on the Mac; I hope the transition will be seamless.