Being an IT Consultant by trade I work every day with PCs, and very little with Mac. As a matter of fact, I’ve harbored a secret malice against the Apple spawn for all these years because of their foolish spending on more expensive and consistently inferior hardware. Add that to the fact that I hadn’t used an Apple since high school, and we’re looking at a die hard Microsoft Zealot.
Enter the iPhone. I was fortunate to have gotten my first iPhone expense free due to my problem solving persistence, and once I realized what an amazing piece of hardware it was, I was forced to take another look at my anti-Apple opinions. Unfortunately I was still unable to lay my hands on any other kind of Apple hardware, and with the death of my original iPhone 2g, and subsequent purchase of my BlackBerry, my faith in all that is PC was rapidly revitalized.
Enter the iPhone 3g. My shiny new BlackBerry Bold presented me with a myriad of unpleasant issues, and as a reminisced about the seamless and innovative interface of my iPhone, I posted an ad on CraigsList to trade the Bold for another iPhone. I had a response to my ad in moments, and was quickly on my way to San Jose to make the trade. Once that iPhone 3g was in my hot little hands the flood of Apple friendly emotions quickly rushed back into me, and I began to question my loyalty to Big Bill.
As with anyone who questions their faith in something I wavered for quite a while back and forth. A client of mine dumped a Dell that had been pretty badly damaged, and I refurbished it into a lean mean Vista machine. Unlike many of my professional peers, I thoroughly enjoyed the new look and feel of Vista. Once I turned off some of the annoying features, and streamlined the way stuff was organized it was a pleasure to work with. Sadly the foray into Vista was short lived and I reverted to an older machine running XP again in the name of expediency.
By a stroke of luck a friend of mine needed some repair help with one of his clients, and offered up an older iBook as payment so I could play around with the Mac OS X. I was pretty much sucked in after that. My attempts at hackint0sh had all failed and my iPhone generated Apple lust quickly jumped at the opportunity to have a Mac around. The deal sealed I took the iBook home and started to poke around a little. Sadly the PowerPC technology was a huge disappointment in an age of multi-core intel processors, and the iBook ended up being little more than a glorified web browser, minus the ability to play flash videos. So it was back to my trusty dusty Dell, MS faith shaken but not broken.
Then the phone call happened. My friend found a trashed MacBook at work and asked me to take a look at it and see what kind of trouble it would be to get it repaired. I took it home, got it apart, and quickly realized why it wouldn’t turn on. The machine had been fed a can of Coke and the entire unit was fried. With a new logic board costing $1000 from the Apple store, and a used one costing what a new MacBook would cost I gave him my analysis and asked if I could keep the burned out machine. He graciously let me keep the wreck and I started the lengthy refurbishing process. The first thing I replaced was the RAM and a few other components. I was able to get the machine to start on battery but it wouldn’t power using the AC adapter. I took it to the Apple store and had it analyzed for a couple days, and due to the spill damage on the logic board they refused to work on it. Yay.
A little bit dejected but full of rascally determination I took the MacBook apart and started buying and replacing power related parts. When all that failed I took a long shot and gave the logic board an alcohol bath to remove any corrosion and liquid from the contacts. Put back together it still didn’t work, so I looked around for additional ways to get it repaired. I was facing a massive amount of money to bring this Mac back from the dead, so I was thrilled when I found a place that would actually work on the logic board one chip at a time. I didn’t have the cash for the repair, but I called the shop up and dropped it off anyway. A week later I got the great news that the power issue had been resolved, and turned my Dell in to cover the cost. Five minutes later I was wholly converted, and rapidly possessed with the Apple Fanboy spirit.
So here I sit, MacBook in lap with some minor repairs remaining (topcase needs replacing due to a shorted mouse button, hard drive is too small), iPhone in pocket, and the iBlog before me an Apple Fanboy. I am one of the few PC Techs that brings his MacBook to the jobsite instead of his ThinkPad. So is the story of my Apple conversion.
LOL, I hope that was as much fun to read as it was to write.
