My Previous Apple Experiences

I've never owned an Apple computer and I haven't had to use one on a consistent basis at any jobs. Many years ago I did technical support for a local ISP and had to configure internet connections for Mac clients but that is about it.

In general, I found there to be too many compatibility issues with Mac computers and a lack of support for main stream applications. I've also found that gaming on the Mac was significantly behind PC gaming.



The first Apple hardware I have owned was an Ipod Nano. It's hard to ignore the simplicity and ease of use in a small form factor with the Ipods. My wife mainly uses the Ipod though and I don't carry it around with me on a regular basis.

I carry around a cellphone and am more interested in carrying around one device to do everything instead of multiple devices for different tasks. The Nano is great though in the car on long trips and I use it in my living room home theater to play music as well as pumping songs out to my backyard.

Along with the Nano, I've adopted the use of iTunes for my music collection management. Not only is it easy to buy songs and TV shows it is easy to browse and categorize existing songs. Windows Media Player fails horribly at this through all of its different versions.

Last, my wireless network is powered by an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. I've gone through several years of using Linksys wireless routers and was plagued by constant lock-ups and having to power cycle the devices as well as poor range. After learning that Apple has a new router supporting the 802.11n draft standard and reading several positive reviews on it I decided to pick one up. It is on the higher end of the price range but after six months of use it has been solid as a rock. I've literally configured it the first day and haven't touched it since (besides installing firmware updates that it notifies me about). I have been extremely happy with this hardware. The signal strength reaches significantly farther than my Linksys and I have no problems getting a wireless connection in the backyard.

Other then those two hardware items and the iTunes software I don't have any experience or knowledge with Mac OSX. My research has showed though that Apple might have overcome many of the early problems keeping people from using a Mac such as software compatibility and performance with the adoption of the Intel chipset.

Next up...my current computer hardware and how my home office is setup.