I’m sad to say it, but I’ve fallen into that shiny Apple loving pool of hipsters. No really. I bought a Macbook Pro about a week ago. Now I can finally join the league of graphic designers.

I’ll start with some honesty. Macbooks, Macs and the like are good because of one thing. Apple has some incredible marketing. There is so much hype and archaic reputation floating around that people blindly buy Macs now. The whole “industry standard” thing is very true—Back in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s very true that Macs flew past any PC in performance, safety and usability. See how that was all past tense? The world has changed. You can now pay well over $2000 on a Macbook Pro or spend about $1000 to get a PC that is point for point, stat for stat, the same. It’s the name and the age old mantra’s that is keeping them alive. That and the shininess.

If you haven’t gotten it by now, I am not a huge fan of my new Macbook. I love the industrial design, for sure. Apple is a power house of good designing, but the slim key board and shiny casing only does so much for someone. When time is money, very literally in the business of design, workflow and actual use of the computer is important. Which brings me to my big quam with my Macbook. OSX cripples this potentially great machine.

I know all about Bootcamp running Windows, I’ve even tried it with both Win7 and XP. You lose your battery life, lost of very important keyboard fuctions are gone, the trackpad loses all multitouch features and it chews up RAM more than Youtube running on Windows Vista. It’s brutal. I’m sure it works fine for some people, but I simply cannot stand for my battery being cut in half and over a quarter of my RAM being blown at startup.

Now why not just use OSX you ask? Because it is outdated. I don’t mean outdated as in “so last year”, I mean it as “so last decade”. OSX was released in 2001, when the dock was still revolutionary. Or when the document-is-the-window style of computing made sense (aka no “maximizing” windows). OSX had lots of good features back in the day, but as a experienced user of OSX and Win7, I can say that OSX is not intuitive in comparison. It’s a mess that is not conducive to good work, especially for someone with the attention span of a squirrel.

So my point is, Macs are great and all, but by no means should the world blindly crawl to them just because they USED to be the best of the best. And oh, Steve Jobs? Try and make a modern operating system that was made in this DECADE. Thanks.

P.S. As a note, this was a rant fueled by my frustrations. I think am starting to like the Macbook, more so the hardware though. I’ll get used to OSX, even if I don’t like it all that much. We shall see how I like it after a while.