Thanks for all the input on the topic. It's been entertaining, helpful, and interesting to hear the viewpoints. :)
I'm not sure what I'll do. I'm several months away from making a purchase. My thinking is leaning in this direction: 1. I always have a corporate laptop, sometimes two, with Windows on it. It's not like in days past when I needed Windows on a desktop to be compatible with work. Both my wife and son have Windows 7 laptops, so I'm covered there. If I absolutely needed my own version of 7 I could upgrade my Vista workstation, or buy a bargain basement used laptop. 2. Win 8 is out of the question. 3. Win 7, as far as I'm concerned, is now a dying OS. I understand and expect it'll be supported my Microsoft for some years to come, and that I could be just fine using it for quite a while, but I don't, in principle, like the idea of buying the older version of an OS on a brand new machine. There's just something wrong with that picture. Had MS not released Win 8 as they did, or had they not released Win 8 at all, I wouldn't feel this way. 4. I don't need to go though the pain of Win 8 first hand to form an opinion. Enough bad reviews and examples, combined with my own perceptions leads me to believe it won't enhance my productivity. 5. I'm sure I can work on the Mac OS and I can boot into Windows if I felt the need to. 6. Since the only thing I'll use a Mac laptop for is photography, e-mail, browsing, web page development, I don't forsee the need for any specific Windows application. With Adobe Creative Cloud, the Mac versions of the Adobe software will cost me nothing more. In my mind, MS and Windows are starting to lose some of their raison d'etre, and are quickly losing relevance in the world of smart phones, Chromebooks, tablets, etc. They may be a stalwart of business systems and development platforms for some time to come but NEEDING them in the home will be (maybe is), to some extent, like needing an IBM mainframe running MVS in the home. 7. Apple has some 15" Macs with IPS Retina display, all SSD drive, a top or 1-tier below processor with 16GB of RAM in the same ballpark price-wise as Windows laptops that are similarly spec'd. 8. I'm just not feeling the love for Microsoft and Windows at the moment. Tom C. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
