darryl ramm’s blog

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.

My current ThinkPad T42 is especially constrained by memory and disk capacity. It has a 1.7 GHz Intel Pentium M processor, the maximum 1.5 GB DRAM (one 1 GB DIMM and 512 MB on the motherboard), a 60GB 7200 RPM hard disk, a combo CD/RD DVD drive and a gorgeous 1400 x 1050 pixel screen. The hard disk is jammed full and I have to remove applications to install new ones, and I don’t have enough space to work on Photoshop images etc. With disk space being so critical, I am already upgrading the hard drive with a 100 GB Hitachi TravelStar E7K100, this is the largest 7200 RPM Parallel ATA (PATA) drive available. At around $150 all up cost, including the UltraBay Slim adapter this seemed a reasonable cost to solve some immediate problems. I do have a LaCie “Lego Brick” 500 GB USB 2.0 external hard drive where I archive things and use when playing with large videos etc. But even small portable USB 2.0 drives are not that practical when carrying around the laptop.

Windows XP on the ThinkPad T42 has been beautifully stable and so much of Windows Vista looks like just worthless crap — who cares about Aero glass window decoration. Unless you are hard core gamer I don’t see why anybody would want to upgrade to Vista. And I’ve seen too many people struggle with Vista problems to want to go though that even if there were Vista features that I saw any reason to want. The most recent pain I observed was a friend with a high end HP laptop with Vista related issues with incompatibilities with HP provided drivers and software updates, and it took him trying to contact Marc Hurd, HP CEO, to get attention on fixing his issues (which to Hurd’s credit was apparently pretty prompt).

So I think the time is here to switch to just return to a Mac and get a MacBook Pro. In college I used the original Mac, Lisa and the Macintosh II, my last Macintosh was a PowerBook 180. I switched full time to Windows with Windows 95. I my current consulting/advisory work I need a desktop replacement class laptop that lets me carry my portable office with me. It needs to be able to run usual business productivity applications, high end applications like Photoshop, do some basic video editing and have 3D animation capabilities for Naviter SeeYou, specialized software for soaring flight planning analysis.

So the first thing is what software I have now, wether I’ll “cross grade” to the same software running under Mac OS X, run the software under VMware Fusion, find different software to do that task, give up using/needing that software all together. Being anal retentive I created a spreadhseet of all the software currently on my ThinkPad and went through these questions. That spreadsheet is shown as a table below.

I have lots of Adobe applications that I use frequently and so I called Adobe customer support to confirm detail of their “cross grade” (my term) program. All I need to do is upgrade current Adobe applications to the latest (currently CS3) version on Windows then contact Adobe support and they can start the process to switch to Mac licenses. I will need to fax Adobe a proof of destruction letter. Sure I’ll end up with more current versions of the software so some of the switching cost is a little artificial, but I’d have no reason to upgrade otherwise.

For the Glideplan flight planning software, it is even easier, I checked with Matt Herron the developer, and the same license key works on Mac OS X or Windows, I just need to download a new binary to the Mac and use my existing license key. I wish more software vendors would do that (and I’m sure Apple wishes they would as well).

It is clear that my largest issue is video editing software. For the occasional things I do Premier 6.5 was OK, even though it was old and klunky and had quite a few bugs. I could upgrade to Premiere Pro CS3 for only $292 and cross grade to the Mac using Adobe’s “cross-grade” program, or by Final Cut Express for $299. Final Cut Studio remains a relatively expensive option at $1,200. It is a pity that Apple seems pretty unwilling to offer incentive programs for Final Cut Studio. You apparently can’t apply a purchase credit from Final Cut Express towards a Final Cut Studio purchase and I called Apple to confirm there is no competitive program for upgrading from Premiere to Final Cut Studio (although Apple have offered them in the past). I wonder how much not having an upgrade program maybe trying to play nice with Adobe.

When thinking about all the costs of Windows software and thinking about things like what Windows add-on software like Visual Studio, costs, it is nice that Mac OS X is a relative bargain with things like developer tools bundled with the operating systems. On the other hand Apple actually manges to get out OS upgrades frequently enough that probably are compelling enough that they’ll make up for OS platform/tools revenue with OS X upgrade adoption.

Anyhow here is my software upgrade table -