Switching to Mac

Over the past few months I’ve been more and more intrigued with macs. I think it started just about two years ago when I got my first iPod. I realized that the design was SO elegant that it was really really well made. I still think that the iPod is an incredibly well designed music listening device – just think about the controls on it – very simple but yet it does everything you want it to. And the learning curve is not steep at all. It just makes sense and it works well.
My son, Bryan, told me that this is true of the mac computers too and so I started paying attention more. Now about ten years ago when I started teaching at Calvin they had just stopped requiring PCs for everyone because macs are particularly good for certain things and they were allowing them again but I wanted nothing to do with them. The classroom in which I taught, though, had a mac so I learned quickly that the windows interface and the mac OS were really quite close. I made the transition with little problem. My anti-mac bias started to crack.

My kids’ school, Holland Christian, is now part of a program in which every student, grades 6-12, has their own laptop computer – a mac. I went to visit the school to specifically look at this project with an IT friend from Calvin and we were very impressed. Also, this sumer, when Bethany came home for vacation for a week and a half she had her new mac and I was quite impressed with the way she could just lug it around and how quickly it would start up and work. It was very very cool. That made me think that I should try a mac but one thing was stopping me – I use GroupWise for my email, calendar and to-do list all the time and I couldn’t live with just the web interface.
Lo and behold, last week I discovered that I didn’t have to – I found out that there is a GroupWise client for mac that Calvin uses. I borrowed a mac from Calvin’s A/V and tried it out. I loved it.
So, Monday I get my own mac. I’m already starting to feel a little bit like “that guy” who is always talking about how cool macs are – I’ll try to resist but they are pretty cool.