I love my Mac

For a long time, I despised Macs. When I was in high school I worked our school newspaper, and we used Pagemaker on Macs to do the paper's layouts. Those Macs crashed ona regular basis, so much so that when working one had to hit open-apple-s (save) once a minute in order not to lose valuable work. Not only was that a waste of time, but waiting for the computer to reboot after it froze also took way too much time. So I developed a decade-long aversion to all things Mac.

In the end, though, I was deeply unsatisfied with the Dell laptops that got me through graduate school. My first laptop had to be repaired when it was less than a year old; the on switch stopped working. Dell's customer service was pretty good then, and the repair happened quickly. But when the computer died, it completely died. The keyboard fritzed out, followed by the hard drive (within about five minutes of each other). The warranty had expired three months before. So I got a new Dell, and this one developed problems almost immediately. When it was less than a year old, it needed a new processor and processor fan, since it consistently overheated and shut off. A year after that replacement, it started overheating again, leading me to conclude that Dell sells poorly engineered machines.

So it's a real relief to have a functional new Mac powerbook, which I've been using for several weeks and appears to be working flawlessly. Not only does it have a cool feature that allows me to take goofy pictures of myself, but it doesn't crash or shut down. It's a strange feeling to have a reliable computer!

I've also been using itunes, which I enjoy (especially now that I've figured out how to make it pause between songs instead of slurring them together DJ style--that works great for pop music but not for opera!). I've digitized most of my music. I don't have an ipod but I've developed a yearning for one. I'm also using Endnote 10 for Mac, which also seems to work better than the PC versions I've used.

So, am I a convert? I'm not sure. I've got my semi-functional Dell laptop set up at home, and I'm using the MacBook Pro here in the department. Rest assured: if the MacBook acts up, the blogosphere will be the first to know!