I never was a fan of Apple products. Sure, they looked slick, but in my opinion, they were toys, for designers, not for hackers. And they were expensive. A good friend of mine had bought a MacBook Pro and after the initial excitement faded, he became more and more disappointed until he finally switched back to his Linux desktop and sold his Mac with a big loss. My prejudice against Macs seemed to be confirmed. Little did I know that I would join the cult of the Mac soon.
After I graduated in the beginning of 2009, I joined sevenload. Being a tech startup, it was a gadget heaven were many of my collegues had a smart phone, mostly iPhones. I was happy with my not-so-smart SonyEricsson. Sure, the iPhone was slick, but mostly a toy. And too expensive. Well, I managed about 4 month being surrounded by iPhones on daily basis before I broke down and one day after work walked into a T-Mobile shop and bought one. With the App Store gold rush going, my rational explanation was that I was going to develop iPhone Apps and needed a device. I wasn’t wasting 600 EUR on a phone, I was investing it!
Of course, that also meant that I needed a Mac. Having spent way more money on a phone than I was really comfortable with, I bought a used Mac Mini on ebay.
I used it only for iOS development, putting it to sleep and turning to my Linux desktop for anything else. I put it to sleep, but I never turned it of.
It wasn’t sleeping. It was waiting. Waiting for me to just quickly check something on the web. Something that didn’t warrant booting my noisy PC.
At first, it was a friendly coexistence. But with my development mostly happening in XCode at the time and most other stuff happening in the browser anyway, I had less and less reason to turn to my PC. I usually turned back to it for other stuff after a few hours on the Mac, but sometimes, it stayed off for a day or two. And days became weeks, and weeks became months.
And one day, I realized that I had become a Mac user.
Epilogue
My conversion to the Mac was completed when I switched from a Linux PC to an iMac at work. I was chosen to maintain our iPhone app at some point in the future, so I obviously needed a Mac now. Ironically, I never had the opportunity to write a single line of Objective C at work until I left the company.