Oh No!Not Another Mac vs. PC Blog Entry!

Given how I'm old and all, I've been using computers for a long time, strictly PC's, going back to the days of MS-DOS.  I can't say that I've ever been religious about it, but PC's have been the logical choice.  I used to do a lot of development (mostly in MS Access, which is highly platform dependent), and to the extent that I sometimes brought work home from the office, strict compatibility, without having to think about it was a virtue.  I used other people's Mac's occasionally, but failed to see what all the fuss about (and really didn't like one-button mice).

Recently, my wife has significantly ramped up her level of computer usage, and for the first time, we really needed a second machine.  My own requirements have changed.  I really don't do any development anymore, and am most interested in doing more writing and more music production.  Time constraints aside, I had largely given up on music on the computer.  Multi-track audio on a PC that has to run a lot of other software and be shared by multiple users really is a pain in the ass, and I have completely lost whatever capacity I once had to fight with the assininity that is the way Windows configures stuff.  I also wanted a laptop rather than another desktop machine.

Putting all these thoughts together, it became clear to me that it was time for a Mac, a specifically, a MacBook.  Even though at first blush

Part of me really resists this because I absolutely despise cult marketing, Apple's in particular, and don't want to reward it with my business.  Mac's also appear to be (significantly) more expensive at first blush.  But after doing a bit of due dilligence, it became clear  to me that a PC laptop comparably configured to a MacBook is really not much cheaper.  It used to be impossible to figure out what "comparably configured" really meant, but now that Macs use Intel CPUs (and only the high-end ones), um, apples to apples comparisons are much more straight forward.

The other real kicker is software. Mac comes bundled with a multi-media suite called iLife that achieves a level of integration and interoperability that's comparable to what MS Office achieves with "productivity" software.  iLife includes something called GarageBand, which for me turned out to be the coup de grace.  GarageBand is what's called a "digital audio workstation" -- basically, a recording studio in a (virtual) box.  In its first few releases, it was basically a toy, dumbed down version of a DAW, but the latest release is a whole 'nother story.  It has all the functionality I will ever need, is free, and requires no configuration because it comes pre-installed and guaranteed to work.  There is nothing comparable out of the box in PC land.  OK Mr. Jobs, you can have my credit card number now, but please, no more of those stupid PC drone in a suit vs. Mac hipster in jeans commercials ...  

The other big seller with GarageBand is that it includes it's own collection of synthesizer sounds, and "loops" that are tightly integrate with the rest of its functionality, as opposed to DAWs that treat these things more as ancillary "plug-ins" that require more in the way of getting the pieces to talk to each other.  In practical terms, this means that for someone like me who is neither a competent keyboardist nor drummer, I can build tracks that have fairly convincing fake drums and keyboards much more easily than I could in the DAW packages I had used previously.  At some point I may actually detail some of this, but for now, evidence of my first efforts with GaragBand is below.  Several other generations of audio production technology are represented here.