I read every one of my emails, and Peter MacLeod’s was no exception:

I know you probably get a lot of emails about this subject but I thought I would also share my story with you too.

I love stories; send ‘em to chris@pirillo.com if you have a good one.

I have been a dedicated PC User/Builder/Programmer for over 15 years and would have never thought I would ever switch to Mac, but I did.

Well, I never thought I’d want to leave the Commodore 64, but I did. :)

I do a lot of programming using Visual Studio for Microsoft Windows and for some odd strange reason Visual Studio always seems to kill my Microsoft Windows OS after about 2-3 months of use. This has been happening every since I first got Windows 95 the day of its launch. I don’t exactly know why this happens but I would guess it has to do with programming and calling Windows APIs that Windows didn’t like.

Honestly, I don’t think any OS can escape a reformatting every year or so. Sometimes it’s nice to start with a clean slate – so long as you’re not forced to do so. I’m wondering how many power users out there have felt the need to reinstall Tiger after a year of solid use and tweaking?

Whatever the reason, It causes me to have to completely format my hard drive and completely reinstall the Windows OS, the Visual Studios Suite, Office and all my other apps including all the extras required for Visual Studio etc. Every time I have to do this it takes me at a minimum, 2 full days, to reinstall everything back to the way I like it and start being productive again. Losing 2 days of work simply isn’t doable anymore for me. I simply lost way to much time, and got so many migraines simply because of Windows. I have tried several programs to do image backup of my hard drive like Norton Ghost and Acronis and both have caused even more problems then it was worth.

Been there, done that. Found that it was just as easy for me to manually reinstall things than it was to freeze states and restore (with virtual machines being an exception to that rule). Backup apps have always been clunky – and even all-in-one external “backup” hard drives have proven to be equally as cumbersome.

This past February, I finally gave up and decided to go buy a very low end Mac and give it a try. I went to Future Shop here in Toronto and purchased a 17″ Intel Core 2 Duo iMac for around $999 CDN. When I got it home, the first thing I did was install Parallels and Boot Camp so I could install Windows. After that, I installed Visual Studio and all my other apps and began using it for one week without touching any of my PCs at all. The first week, I found myself using Windows most of the time and then Parallels released a new update which had full support for the Intel Virtualization Hardware and WOW.

Path sounds familiar enough.

After that I found myself only booting into Windows with Boot Camp maybe once or twice a week. I was able to compile a Windows app with 2 Million+ lines of code in the virtual Windows faster than on my PC with an Intel Core 2 Extreme and 8 gigs of RAM. I simply couldn’t believe it, Windows actually ran better on the low-end Mac better then my High End PC. That was it for me. I then decided I was totally switching to Mac and bought the Mac Pro with 2x Intel Xeon Quad Core CPUs and bought 32 gigs of RAM from a third party (even though Apple says it won’t work) and I will never look back at my PCs again.

Really? That’s interesting… I didn’t realize the platform supported more than 16. Then again, I’m not quite sure how power users would take advantage of more than that. Any other 32+ giggers on OS X out there?

Everyone told me I couldn’t customize a Mac and install New hardware or even play games – but they were so wrong. I bought a ATI x1900 Video card to play my games and every PC game I can find runs amazing. I haven’t seen the Windows installer or a BSOD every since the switch. Since my switch to Mac, I even started to re-write all my apps in Xcode and hardly ever use Windows at all for anything now.

Well, to be fair, kernel panics can happen on OS X. Not sure if the code you’ve written is more or less prone to BSODs or kernel panics, but… I’d be interested in your experiences with Xcode compared to your previous experience with Visual Studio.

Here’s where Peter’s story gets interesting…

The main app I write is a POS (Point of Sale) program for fast food chains. I convinced my big customers to switch over to Mac Mini systems instead of PCs and my tech support calls have been cut down by almost 80%. Looking back at all the headaches, time, and suffering I could have saved myself, I just hope my bad experiences can help others switch and save themselves and their companies from so much grief.

Would you like fries with that? :)

Don’t ever let someone tell you that a PC is better because a Mac is a PC on steroids. You can do everything on a Mac that a PC can – plus a lot more. With the new addition of Crossfire from ATI for Mac, gaming on a Mac is going to be amazing.

I’m only a casual gamer, but I’m guessing this will become a huge selling point for Apple. Or, a tipping point as I’m starting to see it.

Thanks for your time Chris, loved you on TechTV but your new site is even better. Keep up the great work.

Hey, thanks for the vote of confidence! We’re certainly having fun recording the videos every day, and everybody’s been sharing my cross-platform experiences to boot (no pun intended).

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