Around 9 months ago, the Fortune 500 company I worked for then rolled out a trial to some of its Marketing employees — switch from Lenovo Thinkpads to MacBook Pros. Almost immediately, they had to waitlist interested employees…
Within weeks, another line formed — Marketeers wanting to get their Thinkpads back. Why? Three reasons:
1. No extended battery for the Mac, thus subpar battery life. It’s not easy to go from 5+ hours unthethered back to 1.5 or 2 hours.
2. Wireless connectivity was not as robust on the MacBook Pros as they were on the Thinkpads. More dropped connections.
3. Having to run a very load-heavy corporate software environment, all the test participants mainly worked in Parallels, which was just too slow for their tastes. Boot times were horrendous, waking the thing from sleep similarly slow
Fast-forward 9 months: I’m no longer with this company. Having switched to a MacBook Pro myself for personal use around 18 months ago and being very happy about that switch (18 months with almost no problems, including my very first OS upgrade since Windows 95), I wanted to use my Mac for business as well. But pretty quickly, I learned the limitations of a MacBook Pro in today’s business environment, esp. if your co-workers, partner companies and customers are on XP. My 17″ model is just too big for a daily mobile lifestyle. Battery life is really not that great. Wireless connectivity is decent, but my favorite Wi-Fi service, iPass Connect, is not available on the Mac. Calendar incompatibilities. Email issues. MS Office 2004 just too slow (and I need extended Excel macro capabilities, so upgrading to Office 2008 is not an option). No MS Project or Visio for the Mac. Incompatibilities between the Mac equivalents for Project/Visio and the Microsoft software.
I contemplated installing Parallels or VMware Fusion in order to run Windows. But apart from a required memory upgrade, I would have had to also upgrade to a bigger disk (since my disk is already filled up with photography related files and software which I really bought the MacBook Pro for) and get a Windows license. Not something I really wanted to do, esp. since it would not have solved the battery/size issues I had already experienced.
In the end, I invested around $1000 to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 (with Windows XP pre-installed – no Vista for me). Now I have the best of both worlds – a good work-horse for business and a Mac for my personal stuff.
Related posts:
- How important is Apple’s software to people switching from Windows?
- Switching (part 3): From XP to Mac and back to XP?
- Wait for .1 release before installing any Apple upgrade?
- Backup implementation in a mixed Mac-Windows environment
- Mac is running fine without any software from Microsoft!
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