The path to the dark side
In recent years, I’ve been tempted. Seriously tempted by what many of my peers would consider to be “the dark side”. I’m not talking about “the force”. I’m talking about an operating system.
For going on close to a decade, my buddy Andrew Welch, owner of Ambrosia Software has been tantilizing me with all of the latest and greatest stuff from Apple. The iPod? He had one within months. The iPod nano, he bought them for all of his employees as part of ’employee appreciation week’. A 30″ LCD screen? I think he had two of them, one at home and one at his office.
He’s a registered developer with Apple, so he gets developer discounts, attends the Mac Expo every year, and since he publishes games, loves to show them off to me. All on his Mac of course. “The Windows port of EV Nova will be out later on.” he smirks. “You’ll have to wait”.
Bastard.
For years, I simply couldn’t justify the cost of the Mac hardware, given how much I was likely to use it for anything other than games. I mean, lets face it. I’m primarily a Windows developer living in a Windows world. That’s just the way that it is.
Then came the Mac Mini. *drool*. A friend of mine bought one. He drove all the way to New Hampshire to get it one day so he wouldn’t have to pay sales tax on it. Smart move. Maybe too smart. Not long after he bought his, and I was considering getting mine, they released an upgrade for it. Again… tempting…
Time passed, and Apple switched to the x86 architecture. That’s great, but I’m itching to get that Athlon X2 4400 with dual core and 1MB of cache.
January 2006: Enter duo-core Macs. Tempting, but they can’t boot Windows.
April 2006: Apple releases Boot Camp, allowing Windows XP to run on the Mac hardware.
May 2006: MacBook Pro released. Duo-core x86 architecture laptop. *drool*
Chances are better than 50/50 that by the end of June, I will own a MacBook Pro and begin using it as my primary laptop computer. I’ll keep OSX to play around with of course, but Windows will be my primary working area because it has to be. Maybe I’ll toy around with some cross platform development. I would have one of these things in my hands tomorrow, except that the Apple stores apparently don’t carry ones with the 7200rpm drives in them. I’ll have to order it online. Fortunately, that has tempered my lust so I’ll wait a couple weeks before I spring for it.
Yes Andrew, I am on my way to the dark side. Can I play your games when I get there?
