I bought my Macbook on a whim, a very expensive whim, three years ago.  A daily user, I do not regret it a bit.  I love this thing; it’s pretty much my traveling companion. But for my Apple loyalty, the PC-loving blogosphere calls me foolish, pretentious, and technically illiterate.

From a financial-technical standpoint, I understand Macs are expensive and you can get more raw speed and power for your buck otherwise.  A computer science major with Asperger’s who was painfully trying to court me, once turned on my Macbook and, referring to the boot time, said, “It’s so SLOW!”

If I was a gamer, maybe I would care.  But I’m not.  I’m not going to go into a technical spiel, but I don’t mind compromising 60 seconds of my day (no, I didn’t bother counting because I’m not anal retentive) for day-long software stability.

Here’s what I know about my laptop compared to my friend’s laptops that run Windows:

It’s lightweight.  It has excellent battery life.  It never overheats and I can often leave it on my lap for hours comfortably.  The interface is aesthetically pleasing.  The software rarely has problems.  It has frozen to require a reboot maybe twice in its entire life, and that’s statistically impressive considering I’ve used it everyday for three years.

After accidentally dropping it on concrete, part of the main logic board affecting the battery got damaged, and I took it to the Genius bar.  The customer service was excellent, and when I got my Macbook back in 3 days after being shipped out and shipped back, in addition to fixing the problem, they had replaced the keyboard (one button stuck a little cause I spilled something), fixed a chipped corner, and cleaned the entire casing impeccably to look like new.

I’m sure 10 years ago, finding compatible software for Mac OS was a pain.  But the gap is closing. Things I’ve found to be incompatible:  A couple crappy flashdrives.  Verizon’s music software for my phone (big loss, my iPod nano is better). And .exe files from megavideo ads that want to install malware.

Maybe if I were an IT developer, I’d stick with Windows out of practicality.  Maybe if I wanted to play MMORPGs all day, I’d want my own custom desktop with beefy memory and CPU speed.  Maybe if I wanted to code, I’d be a Unix-head.

But I just want to be able to write papers in Word, occasionally Photoshop something, and have 10 tabs open at once in Chrome without it crashing.  For these functions, Apple has fulfilled my needs.