Darth Who

Yep, that's the name Annie gave to her new PC... I like it!

After all, it seems that the switch back to PC went smoothly, considering the pain in the butt Windows can be. It's odd with all these people we hear about switching from PC to Mac... It probably is good for many people, but the fact is that it was not for us. We saw a big downside of owning a Mac, and I'm not talking about the Mac Pro (since this one would probably have done the trick), I'm talking about the "more affordable" ones: the iMac (if you call that affordable - but it really is not that bad considering all that comes with it).

The problem: Annie is a power user. Not power in the sense of gaming power, but more like having a dozen apps running at the same time, one of which is Photoshop with 50+ high-res photos. The iMac just could not handle it smoothly. It did not crash mind you, but you could tell it was hurting... a lot. And it was not the RAM, because it had 2Gb already. The solution should have been relatively easy: time for an upgrade - more powerful CPU, better video capacity, faster RAM, bla bla bla. I usually expect an upgrade of around $500. Well, you just cannot do that with an iMac.

An iMac is basically built like a laptop: you can change very few things in there. I probably could have done this in a Mac Pro, but damn, the cheapest Mac Pro is $2800CAD, and that's the box alone (no monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers) - it's simply not affordable for us. So, what could we do, buy a new iMac? Damn, we spent over $2000 about a year and a half ago only (that was the price of the 20" iMacs back then), and now we should spend another $1700 plus taxes? And then 2 years down the road it's gonna be another $1700 when this one doesn't cut it anymore? The way we saw it is that if we buy a PC now, we would not have to spit that much money each 2 years. Only the necessary components can be upgraded. The rest is still all good. Why would I need to change the monitor, if all that is needed is more CPU power?

The other plus of going back to PC, is that I can pretty much troubleshoot any problem on them, and usually fix it. And if I don't find it by myself, there are TONS of people who can help on the Internet. With a Mac, the resources are very few, and even if I find what the problem is, I very probably would not be able to fix it. And we are not the type of buying the extended warranties everywhere on everything (it's more like close to never), but when buying a computer from Apple, you almost HAVE to, so might as well just add it to the price (so add another $400!!!). Otherwise, having it repaired is uberly expensive, so might as well just buy a new one... Sounds like you lose anyway you look at it :-/

Anyway, I think we made the right choice. I know Annie's going to miss OS X a bit. But Windows is just a getting used to... then it's fine.