Took me long enough, didn’t it? Some of you will recall that two months ago, after having been a Mac laptop user for the past decade, I decided that it was time to shift back to Mac desktop computing. The reasons, while numerous, boiled down to a few simple points: my current MacBook has reached the point where it’s just old and obsolete enough that I was going to have to move to a newer Mac one way or the other. My iPhone has changed my computing patterns to where I rarely use my laptop as a laptop, instead leaving it parked on my desk nearly all the time unless I’m traveling. And my workflow has evolved to where a bigger screen and beefy hardware specs are now more important to me than they have been in a long time.
So a couple months ago I picked up a nice Intel iMac with a twenty inch screen with the intention of making it my everyday main computer, and hanging onto the MacBook solely for when I’m traveling out of town. It was a good plan, but like so many other plans this past summer, it fell victim to those multiple-times-daily DSL internet outages that plagued me for the first two months I lived in this apartment. I wanted to transfer all my data over to the iMac and make it my main computer, of course, but the internet situation forced me to run to internet cafes at one time or another nearly every day, and I needed the laptop for that. Was it ironic that right after I acquired a desktop because I was no longer using my laptop as a laptop, circumstances changed such that I was suddenly forced to use my laptop as a laptop again? No matter how you classify it, the bottom line is that I couldn’t transition my workflow over to the iMac and so it ended up being a really nice-looking paperweight whose giant beautiful screen I did occasionally use for watching movies, but that was it.
Six weeks ago my life magically changed for the better when TimeWarner decided to finally allow me to partake of their cable internet services, and of course the frequent runs to the internet cafes came to a halt. My laptop had gone back to being nothing more than a stationary desktop machine with a small footprint, and so it was time to move everything over to the iMac and start that chapter. Except I didn’t do it. Part of it was that it’s a several-hour procedure to move everything over from one machine to another, and while it’s a nearly automatic process that can be left to run overnight, I was faced with equal parts fear and uncertainty. Fear, because after living through a professional nightmare thanks to the internet situation, I’d finally gotten back my ability to do my job without distraction, and it was like I’d been shot out of a cannon. Did I really want to risk throwing off what had suddenly become an incredibly productive period of my life by transitioning to a new computer? Maybe it wasn’t rational on my part, but after having just lived through the internet nightmare, I was more than a bit paranoid about allowing anything to throw my productivity off again.
Uncertainty, because the longer the iMac sat there idly while I continued to do my work on my MacBook, I began to wonder if I’d made the right choice in acquiring it. After all, the iMac didn’t even have a battery in it. Unplug it and it shuts off? Are you kidding me? Wow, had it been that long since I’d been a desktop user, that I couldn’t even imagine a computer that had to be plugged into a wall socket in order to remain turned on? Yeah, I guess it had been that long. The last desktop I bought was also an iMac, but it was an original iMac, back in August of 1998, which was a little more than a decade ago (gee whiz, am I old enough to have done anything a decade ago?). Within a year I’d moved on to the newly introduced iBook, and it’s been nine years since I’ve used a desktop as my main machine. So yeah, a little culture shock on my part – what do you mean, I have to find space for a keyboard on my desk? Why is the power button hidden on the back? And what do you mean, turning the brightness setting to zero doesn’t make the screen go completely dark? Don’t desktop users sleep in the same room as their computers?
So I was wondering if maybe it was time to give up on the idea, dump the iMac, and go in a different direction. Not a new MacBook, as I don’t think I can keep myself constrained to a thirteen inch screen any longer. Perhaps a MacBook Pro, but then I dug out my old beat up PowerBook G4 (which I keep around strictly for emergencies) and spent a little time with it and realized that even its fifteen inch screen seemed way too tiny compared to this big iMac. Maybe a seventeen inch PowerBook? Eh, I don’t know.
I’m strictly a one-computer user. Give me five computers, and I promise you I’ll keep four of them in a box and only use one of them. I’ve tried over the years, but working on multiple computers simultaneously just isn’t for me. File Sharing, Remote Access, Timbuktu, they’re all band-aids for the fact that at any given time, no matter which machine you’re on, you don’t have immediate natural access to all of your data. I know that using multiple computers simultaneously works for some other people, but I’m not one of them. So my original plan was to essentially keep the MacBook sitting on a shelf except for those times when I was heading out of town, in which case I’d fire up Migration Assistant overnight and take my iMac computing experience with me on my MacBook. Then when I return home, run Migration Assistant in reverse, and move my computing experience back to the iMac. If it sounds like a hassle, it’s not. I only travel a few times a year. And I absolutely refuse to try to do any work on a computer that has any less than 100% of my data on it, as it creates the dual problem of A) not having immediate access to what I need, and B) creating new data on the second machine that won’t be on my main machine when I need it. I know some of you will write in and insist that I adopt your method of repeatedly syncing data between the two machines on the fly, but I can’t stress enough that I have absolutely no desire to have two computers sitting on my desk simultaneously under any circumstances.
The big hole in my plan, though, is that my MacBook’s hard drive is 80 GB, which I’ve filled to the point that I have to be careful about what else I put on it. I knew that as soon as I migrated to the iMac and its 250 GB drive, I’d immediately take advantage of the new breathing room and while not filling it to capacity any time soon, I would quickly expand my data footprint to the point that I’d never be able to migrate it back to the MacBook.
So interestingly enough, it was the arrival this week of a new 250 GB internal hard drive for my MacBook that motivated me to finally go ahead and migrate to the iMac. I was going to need to get my data off the MacBook so that I can swap out the hard drives anyway, so why not just go ahead and move everything over to the iMac? This not only allows me to upgrade the drive on the MacBook, it also allows me to take it in for warranty repair (the entire topcase needs to be replaced, but I’ve been putting it off because I didn’t want to be without it for a week). So yesterday I pulled the trigger. Everything is on the iMac now (I’m typing this on the iMac’s cool new keyboard), and I’m going to use this time to try out life on a desktop. Actually, after firing most of my regular applications, I can’t see myself ever going back to anything less than twenty inches; this is like a whole new workflow. Windows are open at full size and palettes aren’t piled on top of each other, and yeah, I can see myself being a whole lot more efficient on this machine than I was on my last.
After my MacBook gets upgraded and fixed up, it’ll likely just sit for awhile – until it’s time to head back to Florida for the holidays, of course. With the equal hard drive sizes, it’ll be easy enough to migrate my entire user experience back to the MacBook when it’s time to step on that airplane. Until then, this is a tryout period for the iMac. I know there are other routes I could have taken (for instance, buying a newer faster MacBook and connecting it to a twenty inch external monitor, or ditching both the iMac and MacBook and instead ponying up for that seventeen inch MacBook Pro), but this is the path I’m trying out for now. For at least the next month and a half, I’m now a Mac desktop user…for the first time in a decade.
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