After months of frustration and weeks of research, I am on the verge of making one of those life-changing choices; one that I thought I had made years ago, only to recently discover that maybe, I backed the wrong horse.

For many years now I have thought of Macintosh as the "pretender to the (Microsoft) throne"; that they built machines of little more utility than pretty light gaming and some graphics capability. Having said that, I have long been impressed by the build-quality and usability of Apple's iPod range of products, if not always their pricing. Recent events however have conspired and forced me to re-evaluate my beliefs and opinions.

What I have found is an astoundingly strong, loyal -and apparently rapidly-growing user-base! I have found a manufacturer with a unified, integrated approach to hardware and software design -updating the one does not make 't'other redundant! I have found ongoing excellence in design amd manufacture, supported by unrivalled customer support -certainly the service I have had personally on dealing with Apple representatives (NB: not resellers) has been exemplary! And perhaps most surprisingly, the cost of changing software that has cost me hundred of dollars -in a couple of cases thousands- is remarkably low! To retain my current level of software capability, I am able to replace much of my software for free (a good proportion of it is supplied with the machine, free and fully functional!), most of it for under $50 and significantly the suites that cost me the most can be replaced for under $100, with I think one that may cost almost $200!!! Mind blowing. And these machines are still supported, both by Apple and user-groups, 10 or more years down the track, with many machines still apparently running flawlessly. It seems they hold their resale value too, when the time does come to update geriatric hardware.

So, with that all in mind, I'm teetering on the brink of hitting the "Go" button -just the nasty in-fighting of the negotiation remains to be concluded :crazy: Love that bit...

What I'm looking at is:

Macbook Pro, 15", i7 2.66GHz Processor, 4MB RAM, 256MB SSD
1TB Time Capsule (Backup and 802.11N Router)
Wireless keyboard
Wireless Magic Mouse, and
3-year extended warranty -this time, at least!


I'm going to gut the 3 HDD's out of my existing PC, reformat them (once all the data is transferred) and run them as an external data-storage RAID array. My existing monitor (24") will be an ideal 2nd monitor on the MBP. Whatever is left of the PC, I'll offer for sale on EBay -not that I'll get much for it, but someone will find the bits of benefit.

There's a down-side to all this, of course. Apple pretty much "sell cars with the bonnet welded shut". So, you gets what you pays for. Beyond (approved) upgrades to onboard RAM and storage, there are no hardware upgrades available at all. The gear is pretty expensive up-front, but over the projected life of the machine (hell, if it makes it to 5 years, it'll be a huge bonus!!!), it all levels out. Of course, given that there are no viruses in the wild for an Apple OS, the money saved on anti-virus/anti-malware etc will cover the difference in just a couple of short years anyway! Not to mention the fact that there will be no AV software hogging system resources, memory or processor!!! WoW!!!

The icing on the cake, for me anyways, is there's a huge array of aviation software available too!!! Can't wait to get stuck into that!!!

More on that later

OK, the previous post was written 6 months or more ago (disregard the date the forum is showing -that's a furphy since I had to rebuild the site recently), so what's it like?

In a word -AWESOME!

The Windows PC is still sitting here -I can't get it to even fully boot now- basically entirely unused since the day I downloaded all the stuff I wanted to keep to the new Mac! These machines are stunning. As I thought, it runs flawlessly, everything works as/when it should and I haven't wasted a single minute on unnecessary system maintenance! There's been no need to! If OS or software packages need updating, they pretty much do so without any interference from me at all.

All the functionality of the software that I spent mind-numbing money on in Windows has been replaced for less than $500! In a word, I love it

I have no hesitation in recommending a Mac to anyone contemplating making the switch... and I encourage those that haven't thought about it yet to do so -soon!!!

More specifics on Mac aviation software soon...