Adrienne's Profile

I've been planning on switching from PC to Mac for over a year. Haven't done it yet, and it’s not because I’m apathetic. It’s darn expensive to chuck thousands of dollars worth of hardware & software in order to switch platforms. XP has been very reliable for me, and I see no advantage to upgrading—except for the fact that I’m a web designer and I *absolutely need* to have Vista on a test machine. There are many reasons why people won't or can't switch from MS to Mac. Apathy is one reason not to change, but not the most important one. Cost, inconvenience, habit, fear, annoying Mac fanboys, etc. also come in to the equation. It's hard to change when what you've got seems good enough. (How many people are in personal relationships that are less than ideal? Or flat-out harmful?) In my own case, the Intel conversion really hasn't helped me. I rely almost exclusively upon the Adobe Creative Suite for my work, so until that's all sorted out I really can't justify the switch in a major way. Until then, I'll be purchasing a MacBook as a way to begin learning my way around OS X. It will be another 6 to 9 months before I can make a full switch. Fundamental change takes time. The fact that Vista will basically require a new (or virtually new) PC will give some people an opportunity to re-evaluate their OS of choice. I'm pretty confident that I will ultimately be very happy with my decision to ditch my PCs in favor of Macs. But I am *anything* but apathetic about it--I've spent countless hours calculating cost/benefit analyses. It's a big, big deal to me--my livelihood depends upon my computers. So cut the PC users some slack, OK? We're not all idiots. Some of us actually are able to use a PC for days, nay *months* at a time without crashes, reinstalls, and all those other things that are supposed to be frequent occurrences with a Windows machine. I’m always interested to hear people’s personal stories, but I’m a bit leery when someone takes a single conversation and turns it into "a reasonably safe generalization." Many people will get Vista and love it. Many won’t bother to upgrade. Many will say "screw MS" and never look back. Different strokes, folks, and that’s what makes life interesting.