Why a 20-year User of Windows Made The Great Move to a Macbook Pro

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X60s, which had been a great machine, but it was getting old and slow. My Thinkpad served me well for the past 3 years, and went through pretty much everything. I used it daily, carried it to school, work, home, everywhere. It’s size and heft made it a very portable machine, though I never did like how the screen looked — it was much too dark and matte for my liking. My dear machine even travelled from Singapore to the United States without any problems. Throughout the whole 3 years, the only problem I faced it was a motherboard issue that caused some problems with charging the battery. That was solved pretty quickly since I had a 3-year warranty.

I figured that it was time to search for a new machine. I had several in mind:

• Lenovo again
• Sony VAIO
• Apple Macbooks

The new Lenovo Thinkpads that I considered were either the X300 or X200. The X300 was too expensive for its performance. While I did appreciate portability, I didn’t want to sacrifice too much performance for it. The X200 was pretty okay actually, and I was interested after looking at its specifications. Then I looked at the actual notebook, and I wasn’t that pleased anymore. The X200 is a widescreen machine instead of the X60S, and besides that, has an extremely ugly bezel surrounding its LCD.

The Sony Vaios were beautiful machines, but after looking at reviews online, I wasn’t sure if it had a good enough build quality (complaints of hardware problems, heat problems, keyboard defects), and customer service (unresolved complaints).

The Macbook Pro looked pretty good, especially with the new refresh, which introduced a 13″ Macbook Pro, and an in-built SD card reader. The unibody frame just looked so good too. It also had a GORGEOUS screen. Colours just leap out of the screen. Its configuration was twice as fast as my Thinkpad too, and offered a bigger harddrive and double my RAM. The only gripe that I had with the Macbook Pro was it’s weight — it was nearly a pound heavier than my Thinkpad X60s. I figured that if that was the only drawback, it was worth giving up for a better machine though.

My next other concern was software. However, I tried out my friend’s Macbook, and the new Macs ran virtualised Windows really well. If that fails for whatever reason, BootCamp (which is just a dual boot environment) would ensure that I could just run purely Windows on my Macbook Pro. So I took the plunge and got a Macbook Pro. Apple had a promotion where you get a free iPod Touch and a printer when you get it, and I had a student discount too, so it was a pretty good deal.

So far, the Macbook runs perfectly, and everything feels so integrated, and really fast. There are certain changes that need to be made to OSX to make it faster in terms of productivity, and I’ll post my findings in an another post soon. Look out for it!