Switching to the Dark Side

For those of you who have been living under a technological rock for the past few days, Apple released their Boot Camp software around the middle of last week, and that’s what I want to talk about. Because of Boot Camp, and more fundamentally, because of Apple’s switch to Intel processors, the next computer I buy will be a Mac. However, I’m not quite ready to make the switch for two major reasons.

The first reason is price. The MacBook Pro I have my eye on will cost $2800 decked out, and that’s a little difficult to justify considering that my current laptop is barely six months old. Plus, I’ve already decided that I’m going to buy a 24″ monitor before I buy a new computer, so that settles it. ;-) Adding to the price factor is the issue of re-buying all my software in Mac versions. I’m talking about the Adobe Creative Suite, Macromedia Studio, Microsoft Office, etc. That adds up to a smooth grand right there, even with educational discounts. With Boot Camp, I could theoretically boot into Windows each time I needed to use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or Excel, but that would get old fast.

Price issues aside, the second reason why I’m not ready to switch yet is because Photoshop (and all non-Universal programs) would run woefully slow. Like I said above, I could boot into Windows just to use Photoshop, but that’s impractical. Adobe’s programs haven’t been rewritten to run on Intel-based Macs yet, so Apple’s Rosetta software does the translating on the fly. As you could imagine, compatibility comes at the cost of performance. The Universal version of Creative Suite won’t be out for at least another year, so no switching until then.

The funny thing is that I probably won’t even end up using Boot Camp after I switch. It’s nice to know that it’ll be there if I need it, and that peace of mind is what pushed me over the edge.