Computer Upgrade Time - Back to the Macintosh?
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I stopped using a deskside PC about two years ago and like having my whole computing life in one place on a laptop. I’ve been thinking over what to do with my current ThinkPad T42 laptop which is just too underpowered for what I need. High on the list is buying a MacBook Pro and making the switch back to the Macintosh as a primary computer. Part of wanting to upgrade is driven by lack of disk space on the ThinkPad T42 and part of it is driven by wanting more horsepower and memory to run Photoshop on larger images and to do video editing. For video I have an old copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 and I’ve been leery of upgrading this on my ThinkPad since most people I know who is doing video are working with Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio on a Mac.
I’ve been looking at different options and thinking about the switch. Just some of the software I use is shown in the photo above. I thought it might be interesting look at switching from a Windows laptop to a Mac with a reasonable number of applications and so I thought I’d write about some of the experiences. Bottom line is it is going to cost me about $1,200 in software upgrades/cross grades and software relicensing to move to the Mac, and that is without a big splash on something like Final Cut Studio. I wish Apple had a program where I could get an upgrade credit for Premiere to Final Cut Studio, that would make the whole decision pretty automatic. Which will make the purchase of a high-end MacBook Pro something like a $4,700 purchase - Yikes. Sure I get a platform that can do a lot more, especially with video editing, but it’s interesting just how much it costs to move. Time costs of lost productivity and relearning things is going be significantly higher than a few thousand dollars but I look at this as having to bite the bullet some day.
Obviously any switch made easier with the availability of VMware Fusion and SWSoft Parallels Desktop. Don’t expect me to be impartial here, I’ll be using Fusion and I think it is a lot more stable than Parallels Desktop. But both Fusion and Parallels will perform much better than the old Connectix (now Microsoft) VirtualPC did on PowerPC based Macintosh systems.
