The lust and desire I felt for the Macintosh platform is uncannily similar to a religious conversion. Like many such conversions, this one culminated in me taking a reckless and expensive step. I sold my Dell laptop, took out a modest $3000 "AppleLoan," and bought myself a brand new iBook in October 2002. Of course, because of my price constraints, it's a fairly basic model compared to the beauties that are available. I opted to spend the bare minimum in my measly, undervalued, Canadian dollars. Accordingly, my G3 Mac runs at a modestly zippy 600mhz, has 128 megabytes of RAM (soon to be 640), and "only" a 20 gigabyte hard drive. Now, while not at the highest end of Mac (or PC) computing, this configuration alone runs circles around my 333mhz desktop PC in absolutely every respect. One also has to remember that mhz doesn't mean much across different platforms. Intel, indeed, is now trying to remind us that its new 1.6 ghz centrino processor is faster than models racing into two or even three ghz. The iBook records .mp3 files about five times faster than my PC, can churn through a SETI@home datafile overnight, prints documents to PDF files natively, and handily multitasks without crashing or stalling thanks to its use of protected memory. Indeed, the OS never crashes, even after 13 months of heavy use, and running for days or weeks on end without rebooting. It will even simultaneously run two different operating systems without missing a beat.

Networking it was also a dream. Despite the fact that I needed to buy a 10/100 network adapter for my desktop PC, and subsequently install a slew of proprietary and system drivers in order to enable it to share files, all I had to do for the iBook was plug the network cable into the appropriate port and turn on file sharing. At that point, it happily recognized my PC and logged in without so much as installing even one new driver.

The new Unix-centred OS, the stylish iPod, the ease of networking, and (above all else) the fanatically devoted users persuaded me to give the Mac a second chance. I began reading up on the platform, the company, their shared history, and the modern state of Apple computers and its software. I played around on my old SE, and admitted it was really an elegant concept. When I bought my iBook, it was a tremendous leap of faith for me, but I was convinced I'd made the right decision after the research I had done. I even sold my Dell laptop just to afford it. I'd had enough of Windows and the attendant system failures, security holes, driver updates, and the inherent instability. I've never regretted the switch for a second. My computer is elegant, stable, simple, and beautiful. I stole a picture:

Of course, it's fair to say that I am a rabid convert, and accordingly my ravings shouldn't be mistaken for an objective assessment of modern computing platforms. That said, I consider myself a difficult person to impress, especially considering my historical love-hate relationship with computers. I depend on them for my livelihood and education, but at the same time I've always found them unreliable, fussy, cantankerous and more prone to a devastating crash than a driver talking on a cellphone. I can't recall the number of exasperating afternoons spent at work, re-installing software, pulling out hardware, or rebooting the PC after some error message, fatal application error, failed boot, virus, or other really damn annoying calamity.

In terms of the Macintosh operating system, I have found OS X to far surpass any Windows environment in terms of security, stability, ease of use, and functionality, up to and including XP. While it is only 13 months old, my iBook has never yet given me a bit of trouble, despite being used intensively at school and all the knocking about that this entails. This is far more than I can say about my Windows desktop machine. Within a few months of buying it, I had to have the power supply replaced, and now I have to replace the darn thing again. Let alone the nightmare of trying to add new hardware to the machine and wrestling for hours with drivers and software updates to get it to work properly (particularly when I can now simply plug my iBook into something, be it a printer, a digital camera or a CD-writer and, well, it just works). Yes, we have no floppy drives, but it hardly makes a difference to file sharing when the computer networks like a beautiful dream when combined with a cable and a couple of commands.

What's more, there are no OS X viruses, which gives one tremendous peace of mind (though never complacency) during all the blitzes of worms and viruses attacking this new exploit or that. The operating system leaves closed, by default, all the vulnerable ports that Windows leaves open to malicious worms and script kiddies and such. It's also much harder to attack Macs for the reason that any request by any application to alter system files has to be authorized by an admin password, just like *NIX, whereas Windows grants god-like access to any script or program running on the computer.

I feel like a walking advertisement for Apple in all my law classes, or wherever I go for that matter. People constantly want to touch, hold, and use the machine, and have no end of questions about it. My school is a sea of Dells, and when colleagues complain about their computers because they're heavy, noisy, unreliable, drain the batteries too quickly, and the customer support at Toshiba or HP (or wherever) treats them like crap even in the face of a design flaw, I'm reminded again of why I made the right choice. More than one person has said they would have bought a Mac except someone told them they were too expensive, or weren't compatible with anything, and I like to provide my own remarkably different experience such points. Indeed, most popular software was made for the Macintosh first, especially Quark and Adobe products. I have Microsoft Office on my system, Dreamweaver, Netscape, Explorer, Photoshop, Acrobat and ICQ. I can also share files back and forth with my friends over networks or e-mail, because the formats are all compatible across platforms.

The iBook has, in fact, become my main workstation, especially since my desktop PC up and died on me. Most of my website design since February has been completed on my Mac, as has every paper, graphic, sound file, and video game. My Macintosh has also become my favourite music system, as it's storing my entire music library on its hard drive. Now that the brilliant iTunes software is available for Windows, I'm eagerly awaiting the opening of the Apple Music Store in Canada, which allows users to buy and download (and burn) songs from all the major labels for 99 cents each. I bought myself some decent speakers and hardly use my stereo at all now. I must say, I far prefer the digital rights perspective of Apple ("don't steal music" -- backed up with a system allowing you to buy your own music and use it reasonably as you wish) to that of Microsoft, which simply incorporates various forms of copyright protection directly into the software to limit users directly.

Anyway, that's my story. My only regret? I cheaped out and bought the model without a DVD player. I thought, "I'll never need a DVD player on my computer," which in retrospect was the dumbest thing ever since I wound out missing out on some of the neatest multimedia powers of my computer, and it only saved me a couple of bucks. At the end of the day, however, it's just a computer. It's just one that works remarkably well. Try one out if you get the chance. I know I'm never going back.