I’m a bit tight with money…

I’m a skin-flint. My wife is constantly telling me this so it must be true. I don’t spend money (on myself anyway) lightly and feel guilty when I do, I have a family to keep. They on the other hand have no problem whatsoever in spending money. Mine, that is. But that’s ok, because I have a macbook and I can get loads of quality software for very little or nothing.

In a previous life as another PCuser I just could not deal with spending loads of cash on apps that did something I wanted it to do. Build a professional looking website? That will be 400 gold coins, sir. But you can bit-torrent it for nothing using your neighbours broadband if you prefer, sir. And you can spend time instead of money searching out every alternative to this app until your blue in the face without actually doing anything productive if you wish, sir.

Quality Software? Not that mac apps are any better coded (though they might be, haven’t looked, and don’t want to, and don’t care) than MSWindows offerings, and some of them are cross-platform, it just seems to me that mac platform apps have less to contend with, less conflicts with other apps and hardware, less configuration to deal with and definitely, definitely more pleasing to look at.

Windows has freeware too! You don’t have to spend a bundle getting a good app that does what you want. Yes, I know, but have you ever been to a restaurant and thought there was too much choice? Nothing wrong with having plenty of choice but for me there comes a time when I get really pee’d off hoking through tranches of freeware on the Interweb or a magazine CD giveaway, picking some that seem to ok, slapping them on the machine to try out and then instantly removing them because I really need to configure them to work properly. I spend all day configuring and re-configuring in my day job, I don’t want to do it when I get home unless it involves reconfiguring a chicken madras and a beer tin so that it has no lid. I can honestly say that I have done very little configuring of anything I have installed on the mac, it always just seems to work when installed. I remember laughing out loud when I first got the macbook home and joined the wireless network, it took seconds. Literally, seconds. I didn’t know diddly about macs (still don’t) but had joined to my wireless network armed with just a wep key, no installing drivers for a wee usb wireless thingy, and didn’t need to go hoking in any ‘advanced’ tabs to see if there was something there to configure.

There are a lot of apps out there for mac that are very expensive. As you would expect these are aimed at the professional market and are normally cross-platform. But I’m not looking for that, I just want to be a ‘user’. I don’t want to think too much about how can I do this or that, I just want to do it, and I want to get it done in as little time as possible (because that is what I have even less of than money) with as professional output as I can manage. Diminishing returns and all that. And the macbook does that for me, everywhere I look. And there a lot of free or inexpensive apps for mac too, and my next post in ’switchers’ will give you a run down of my current favourites, and why. Until then, go configure.

This entry was posted on 09/08/2007 at 03:32 am and is filed under Switchers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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