A few months ago, I transitioned from my beloved Mac to a PC. I have loved my Macs for almost a decade, but the time has come to move back to the PC. I did not take this move lightly. Apple has done a good job of walling in their playground and it isn’t easy to leave. My wife uses a Mac and we are an iPhone and iPad family. Seamless integration works and it was a compelling reason to stay.
My transition away from the relative safety and comfort of my Mac was driven by a frustration with the direction Apple has taken with their computers. They are leading the pack on mobile devices, but they have seemingly abandoned the computer market. Skylake processors were released 7 months ago, and we still don’t have an updated Macbook Pro lineup as of March 2016.
I have anticipated the release of the Oculus Rift for almost 2 years and it has become abundantly clear that Apple has no intention of releasing a computer capable of driving high end virtual reality hardware. My iMac is still perfectly functional for browsing the internet, banking, and word processing, but I can’t play the latest games because the graphics hardware in almost all Apple computers is insufficient to handle modern game graphics.
About 3 months ago, I embarked on a project I haven’t attempted for over a decade. I built my own computer. In some ways it was easier than it used to be, but the learning curve was steep. The range of hardware options has vastly increased since I last built a computer. For anyone interested in following in my footsteps, I recommend checking out PCPartPicker. If you want to see what I finally settled on, you can check out https://pcpartpicker.com/b/j4zMnQ.
The computer turned out fantastic and I’ve increasingly grown accustomed to Windows 10. The hardest part of this transition hasn’t been using Windows 10 instead of OS X El Capitan, but rather how to integrate this new computer into my workflow. Many of the Mac programs I used on a daily basis are not available on Windows and in some cases, there is no Windows alternative. I intend to follow this post with a series of posts detailing how a hard core Mac user has adapted to using a Windows PC after a decade away. The last version of Windows I used on a regular basis was Windows XP, so a lot has changed.
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