I’ve always been keen to criticise Apple and their products for a multitude of reasons: from making things too easy to their use of the phrase ‘inches thin’. I’ve made my hatred of Apple quite clear for a long time, so my friends were understandably quite surprised when, during a lecture, I retrieved my shiny new MacBook Pro Retina from my bag.
So what made me change my mind about Apple? Well, actually, I didn’t. Allow me to present my unresearched, uninformed and probably slightly biased view on the state of the laptop market:
A few years ago, it was possible to buy a ‘good’ laptop from a number of companies. By ‘good’ I mean powerful hardware and good build quality and small and light enough to carry around without the use of a fork lift. Then Apple became popular. Like… Really popular. In a desperate attempt to claw back sales, every computer manufacturer started producing cheap, plastic MacBook Pro replicas and, unsurprisingly (due to having less experience of being Apple than Apple had) they did a pretty poor job of it. From that point on, buying a non-Apple laptop meant choosing between good specifications and good build quality. Other companies had essentially been pushed out of the market.
Not wanting to compromise on specifications or build quality (as a software engineer, I feel it reasonable to want both of these things) I found myself buying my first Mac.
The gestures are nice, the aggregated notifications are nice, the attention to detail is nice. However, having run OS X, Windows and Linux on the machine in the less-than-two-weeks I’ve had it, I reject the notion that buying an Apple product affects whether or not I am an engineer.
I also still hate the phrase ‘inches thin’.