Returning to the Fold

A year ago, I made the leap from Mac to PC by buying the pieces and building myself a gaming desktop. It was an impulsive move, motivated by too many years of frustration with the limits Mac hardware created for gaming. And I don't regret it because no matter how often I play off gaming in conversation with casual acquaintances, it's a big deal for me.

The stress point though was work: gaming's fun but I use my computer daily for the grind and could I manage with a PC? Over the past year I discovered that I could, largely because Windows 10, unlike its recent predecessors, is a solid OS. And because my school is full-on PC land and the Mac-based fiction I'd dealt with for years disappeared, the jump to Windows was actually near painless.

The key word here is "near."

The main problems? First: junkware. There are a lot of sketchy apps in Windows world and I'm just not interested enough to sort out what's what. Macs feel secure and I believe Apple is interested in keeping them that way. Windows and Microsoft? Not so much. That may be out-dated prejudice given the changes in security features in Windows 10, but suspicions kept me close to the base system for much of the past year.

Second: buying Windows equivalents for Apple software is expensive. People gripe when a Mac app costs more than 10$, but spend some time in PC world and you'll realize that the apps offered by Mac developers are a bargain. Even the "expensive" ones.

Third:Eastgate's Tinderbox. I'd had periods in the past when I was confined to an iPad and have written about how difficult it was to do my work without Tinderbox's various tools, most of which I'd come to take for granted. Those earlier moments had been temporary disruptions. But now, working on a PC, they became my new normal, and after a year of genuine, wide-ranging and eventually desperate experimentation, I realized I missed the software badly. I'd become something like a mental-cyborg used to lifting cars, who now suddenly, alarmingly, finds himself fully organic and stuck lifting groceries. Or maybe some over-filled garbage sacks. I'd grown used to thinking in a way that assumed that my info could be organized into forms I could think about. It was a constant annoyance (and also a real impediment) not to have the tools at hand to make that happen.

But I just sprang for a new MacBook Air—!!!!—and so I am now happily on macOS once again. My first thought: thank god. Yes, my Tinderbox query and action syntax is rusty (very!) and I'm having to find my way back into the forums and the TbRef, both of which feel for the moment like navigating a train station in a language I don't quite speak. But I don't care. As I've said elsewhere: TBX is powerful enough to be game-changing even with only it's simplest tools in play. So it's worth it already and I know the pay-offs will just get bigger as I fall back into the groove.

So for the record my current set-up, which seems close to my ideal, is a PC desktop for gaming and a MacBook for work. (iOS, as tempted as I am to be tempted, is a distraction and a dead-end for me. It's just not part of the equation outside of my phone.)

And since it's Thanksgiving in the States, let me say: I'm lucky to have the means to buy and maintain both systems.