So Apple is going to make it easy for owners of the new Intel-based Macs to dual-boot to Windows, and there’s a lot of buzz, but…I’m sorry, it doesn’t really make a difference to me. There’s two reasons I’m still using Windows (I switched eight years ago after losing one too many work-in-progress files to the then-utterly-unreliable MacOS): many years’ worth of data that I don’t feel like transferring (some is cross-platform, but some isn’t); and one Windows application — EccoPro (a long-orphaned but still remarkable outliner program) — that I use every hour of every day, for which there is no Mac equivalent. (Also, I hate using touchpads, and Apple doesn’t make a laptop with a Thinkpad-style Trackpoint device.)
Dual booting doesn’t help. Ecco is my life- and work-organizer. There’s no way I’m going to boot into Windows each time I want to jot down a to-do. Even if I could alt-switch from one OS to another, I’m not sure that would help. Maybe gaming devotees will appreciate the opportunity to reboot their Macs in Windows, but I’m not sure anyone else will care.
In the end, anyway, what’s happening in software today — as John Markoff’s overview of Web 2.0 software development modularization in today’s Times indicates — is that everything is moving to Web-based applications. I’ll move to a Mac when there’s a Web app that can do for me everything that Ecco does for me now. Then my operating system won’t matter — I’ll use a Mac for its superior hardware integration, and because it’s got more developers doing more interesting new things, and I won’t look back to Windows, and won’t ever want to boot it up on a Mac or anywhere else.
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