My interest in computers started when my brother got a Commodore VIC 20 as a present: what a wonderful machine it was! Later at university, we were doing all our studies on Sun workstations and at home, it became MS-DOS and later Windows. As I was going through all Windows versions, I started to hate the fact I had to wipe out my machine every six months and re-install everything again. My favorite Windows versions were 98 (stable version of 95) and XP (stable version of 2000). All the rest were in between, pretty crappy OS releases.
As my love and interest in open source software (OSS) started to grow, I began to look to Linux and the different distributions and finally got into Fedora Linux, the Red Hat free version. I liked so much that I was starting wondering if I could use it for work too. But the dependency on Microsoft was still an issue: especially if you had to work with MS-Office or you needed to access websites (at the time we did not have HTML5, it were the times of proprietary plug-ins) or had to code in .NET. And please don’t start saying…you could use Wine or some technology: at the time, they were not stable for enterprise productive work. So I gave up.
In 2004, I bought an iPod Nano, my very first Apple product. It was love at the first sight. During that period, I was traveling very often to Chicago for my work. As soon as I could sneak out of the office, I was visiting all the time the Apple store on North Michigan: there were no Apple stores in the world, so to me, it was a fantastic experience every time. It was there that I started to look at iMacs and specifically to OSX: this Unix-based OS, very user-friendly, stable and it runs MS-Office too?! Hmm. Scary but so tempting. When Apple released the first iMac on Intel (2006), I bought it for home. All family and neighborhood thought I was crazy. I waited for the Intel version as there was a plan B, i.e. I could have installed Windows if it was not going to work. But I never did ( please don’t run Windows on Macs, it’s like you buy a Ferrari but you want a Porsche engine in it).
In 2008, I was not traveling to Chicago anymore, but my focus changed to Atlanta. I bought my first MacBook (white model) in the US at Fry’s in Alpharetta (love that place) and started to show up at work with it. I can tell you how much fun it was to show up in meetings with the white MacBook, or boot it and hear the famous Apple sound (why did they remove it?) or share your screen on a web meeting and see an OSX desktop: very entertaining. The best experience was in Seattle at Microsoft where in a big meeting, just as it got silent, my MacBook booted and the Apple sound went through the entire room.
Through all these ten years, I bought or tried virtually all products Apple has ever made. People around me, family, friends and at work started to use Macs too. With the introduction of the iPhone and iPad, it became viral. But …
I have the feeling we are like around 2007, where we were bored around Blackberries, Motorola’s, Windows, etc. and something new like the iPhone came. Since then we are working on refurbished blueprints for laptops, tablets, and phones. Especially the last iPad announcement feels like big refurbishing action: take an iPad pro and make it now an iPad with a pen. OSX hasn’t moved at all and MacBooks either.
Don’t give me a reason to look around, but Apple did. Like I did in the previous years, I started to look Android and the devices offered with it. I am Note fan (despite the Note 7 disaster). I have a Note 8 and I love it. My iPhone X is downgraded to demo device and I hate the experience of iOS 11 and the iPhone X: can I say “top notch”?
But now the shocking news is coming: I have received this week an MS Surface Book 2 with Windows 10. WHAT? Seriously, back to Windows? Yes looking for something new, creative and productive, I am tired of the boring, refurbished Apple hardware. Who cares about OSX vs. Windows? I need new hardware design concepts.
I will post my experiences on a Surface Book 2 in the upcoming blogs.
Massimo
DECODING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 
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