Last week I cracked open the box on my shiny new 13″ MacBook Air.  What a beautiful piece of technology!

The transition from my old MacBook Pro to the Air was a super easy, albeit slow process.  There is something wonderful to be said for the Migration Assistant – what an easy way to move user information from one machine to another!

Start up shiny new MacBook Air, “do you want to copy a bunch of crap from your old one to this wonderful new one” or words to that effect, answer yes, ensure the two are on the same network and essentially it does it all for you.  Estimated transfer time of 24+ hours.  It helpfully said to plug in an ethernet cable but the MacBook Air doesn’t have an ethernet port.  I plugged my old Pro into my internet router and the transfer time dropped down to around 5 hours.  I just left it running overnight.

Next morning everything was over onto the MacBook Air.  The only issue was I had to reset some security on a few folders – no idea why, don’t care as it was easily fixed.

Then yesterday Yosemite was released so I thought why not!  Download of 5GB+ (yikes!) which took around 3 hours on our slow DSL connection.  It restarted a few times and again by morning it was completed – I didn’t stay up and watch it.  Talk about a flawless process.  All my stuff was where I left it, everything looks a little different and things have been enhanced, new features added etc but for all that, I can just carry on without wondering what the heck I’m doing and where has something moved to.

For the record, I am a little disappointed they moved away from the old naming conventions of Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion.  I was looking forward running an OS called Cougar…

Anyway, when I compare the beauty of the OS to the ugliness of Windows 8, I can’t help but wonder what the heck were Microsoft thinking?

Don’t get me wrong, although I love my Mac, I’m not anti-Microsoft.

Windows 7 & Server 2008 are great Operating Systems and I like some of the features in the Server 2012 interface.  I really like the webpage setup utility for Exchange 2013… but I just can’t get over how fugly Windows 8 is.  The colours, the clunkiness, just the unfriendly user interface.

I have heard the argument that it was designed for a tablet, so you don’t get the full functionality of it on desktop or laptop.  But I’ve played with one of those too – a Microsoft Surface.  The only redeeming feature was the keyboard IMO.  I was just glad my client didn’t ask me what I thought of it…

Also the fact that Yosemite is compatible with machines up to 7 years old… well I’m not really sure I’d want to run Windows 8 on a PC that old – I suspect the user experience would be less than stellar.

I know you pay more for a Mac but you get what you pay for.  No crashing, a robust operating system and applications. And I just can’t bring myself at this stage to going back to Windows for home.

At work we were given the choice of a MacBook or and HP running Windows 8. I figured over time I would learn to love it.  10 months on, well it does the job but it does cause me some frustration at times.  Many of my colleagues have gone back to Windows 7 – I’m still hopeful for that “aha” moment when I will see it in all its glory.

So we await news of Windows 10, Windows 8 perhaps being put away into the same box as Vista, ME and Windows 98 – you know, the versions what you wish you didn’t know about…

And in the meantime I’ll play with my fabbo new MacBook Air and enjoy all its whizzy new features while I await my Snow White decal for the front to arrive in the post.