I'm attempting to switch back to the Mac for the third time in the last four years. Back in the old days, before the Web changed everything, I was a dedicated Macintosh advocate. However, when Apple essentially dropped support for enterprise customers in the mid-nineties (and discontinued the Newton, a device way ahead of its time) I decided it was time to start figuring out this whole Microsoft Windows thing.

In any event, back in October of 2003, I picked up a 15" Aluminum PowerBook G4 on the day Mac OS X Panther shipped. It was quite an event. People were lined up and crowded outside the UTC Apple Store and they would cheer when someone would walk out of the store with a new Mac. It was quite an experience. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of my time developing software for Windows and I had hoped that Virtual PC on a G4 would allow me to run applications such as Visual Studio quickly enough to be productive. I had also hoped that Entourage would sync with my Exchange server seamlessly enough to not miss Outlook. Unfortunately, I ended up going back to Windows XP after being frustrated by the inability to run both Mac OS X and Windows on the same computer.

In May of 2006, I picked up my first Intel Mac, a 13" MacBook the first day that it shipped. It was a beautiful piece of hardware with a wonderful flat keyboard, bright screen and good performance. Unfortunately, it damn near burned a hole in my kitchen table it ran so hot. So hot that Apple gave me a full refund when I brought it in to be looked at.

Last week, I picked up a 15" Aluminum MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz with 4 Gb of RAM and a 250 Gb hard drive. VMWare Fusion for Mac is allowing me to run my Windows software well enough and quickly enough that it can definitely serve as a replacement for my Thinkpad. I do sorely miss the ability to draw directly on the screen of my Thinkpad X60 TabletPC, but I'll just keep it as a dedicated art machine. Hopefully Apple will release the tablet Mac that they've reportedly been working on for years.

I'll be posting on my experiences attempting to switch from Windows Vista to Mac OS X over the next few weeks.