It feels so wrong but also so right

I need to run a Mac-only program. So I bought a MacBook Pro.

This will actually be the third Macintosh I've owned. My second computer when I was 3 years old was a Mac Classic. And, back in early 2005, I was bored of my PC and wanted a change, so I bought an iMac. There was no real need to do so, but fueled by my interest in computers in general, and the overblown promises from Apple's marketing department (and OK, some annoying rundll32.dll errors), I decided to dive in head first into the Apple paddling pool.

Two days later I immediately backflipped out, repulsed by the slow, unstable machine that I'd just paid a premium for. The rabid Apple cult (which sadly does exist, by the way, and plagues the credibility of these already curious machines) suckered me in with nonsense like, "You can't compare the performance of G5 processors to Intel ones", a feat I accomplished by using a stopwatch.

No matter how pretty the operating system could be, the facts were that it was actually crashing more for me, and was taking its sweet time to do so. Throughout the experience,I was constantly thinking, "Just think of the kickass PC you could have assembled for this ridiculous price". Oh, and the way the operating system handled my mouse (my own mouse, with two buttons and a scroll wheel, for that matter) made simple use intolerable very quickly. Furthermore, I was kidding myself when I thought I could live without Windows. I can't, it's a fantastic operating system with bucketloads of useful software which runs only on it. And this is coming from someone involved with video. I imagine in other areas (gaming, anyone?), Windows is even more essential.

Well, a lot has changed in 3 and a half years. It seems that now, you CAN compare the clock speeds of G5 and Intel machines, because after Apple switched to the latter, they themselves used taglines such as "Up to (number of times) faster!". That would seem to have solved the performance issues, and has famously solved the issue of Windows dependability, because you can run Windows on an Intel Mac anyway. And now that Apple have finally introduced a two-button mouse with a wheel, applications on the system actually support this functionality.

So, since I was looking out for a laptop anyway, I thought it would be smart to get a great deal on an Apple one so I can use any OSX programs I need to, and also run Windows for when I don't. A 2.4ghz / 2gb Macbook Pro is on its way to me. I got one hell of a deal on it, by the way - on one of the outgoing models, not the ones with the mirror screen and the silly track-button-pad. I look forward to using the hardware and giving honest impressions of Mac OS X.

By the way, I'm installing Windows on it so I can encode high quality MPEG-2 (OK, there's the new CinemaCraft plugin for Compressor, but not everyone has that sort of money), do a lot of niche video processing tasks, and run Sonicstage to transfer music to my Sony Walkman (shut up, at least my MP3 player has usable buttons on it).

And just to have a change in case I accidentally overdose on pictures like this one and have to escape for a while. They may have taken my body but they shall never take my soul.