I’m giv­ing back my Mac today.

The con­tract unequiv­o­cally requires prop­erty to be returned and so it is that I’m giv­ing the Mac back at some point today. Mind you, about six months ago I’d never used a Mac before and the almost pro­hib­i­tive price had always kept me at bay. I was the prover­bial die-hard PC guy. So when I was offered the Mac — after I’d burned through one and a half of my own per­sonal PCs at work — I gladly accepted it out of sheer curiosity.

In the six months since I’ve had this Mac, I’ve turned on my PC exactly two times; and both times, it was to try out PC-only soft­ware. Suf­fice it to say the Mac­Book Pro is sub­lime. What’s not to like? Once you get past the stuff that works dif­fer­ently, you won’t imag­ine how you ever worked on any­thing else. I think this applies to more than the cre­ative pro­fes­sions: the Mac has not really improved my pho­tog­ra­phy work­flow. Rather, I feel like my productivity’s been boosted across the board. Maybe it’s the more log­i­cal OS and UI (and I pre­fer Tiger to Leop­ard). Maybe it’s because it crashes much less fre­quently. Maybe it’s because you can have close to a gazil­lion tabs open of Fire­fox and a bunch of other stuff run­ning at the same time and every­thing still works. Maybe it’s the 3 hour bat­tery life. And maybe it’s also “Spaces”. The com­bi­na­tion of these things and more made it a plea­sure to open up the Mac in the morning.

As a quick side­note, I’ve often heard it said that Mac would con­vert most PC users if they gave 30-day trials.

Besides the obvi­ous reluc­tance of going back to a Vista machine (ie, “Once you go Mac, you can’t go back”, etc.), I’m now also faced with the time-consuming has­sle involved in set­ting up a work­flow that had been per­fected on the Mac. Some of it relates to the time it takes to find and install the right exten­sions for Fire­fox. Part of it has to do with giv­ing up soft­ware that exists only for Mac, like the excel­lent Skitch. And the other part has to do with soft­ware that I had bought and installed, like Omni­Fo­cus, and will be unable to use until I get another Mac.

So when will I get another Mac? As soon as I can … and uti­mately, a brand new Mac trumps a depre­ci­ated one.

“… you’ve left me with noth­ing but I have worked with less.” -Ani Difranco.

Update: My PC lap­top won’t start for some rea­son, I’ll have to get that fixed now and maybe rein­stall Vista. I’ll lose a bunch of nice soft­ware I had installed, though.

Update 2: I got a new Mac­Book, which is per­form­ing bet­ter than the Mac­Book Pro I was using. Maybe it’s the clean install. I had con­sid­ered get­ting a 20″ iMac — they’re amaz­ing — but I really do need some­thing mobile. The Mac­Book is even more con­ve­nient to carry around than the Mac­Book Pro.

Note: It’s worth clar­i­fy­ing that I’m not asso­ci­ated with Apple or any dis­trib­u­tor. Also, I real­ize in the rel­a­tive scheme of things, there are many worse things …