With less than three weeks left of my permanent web dev position, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my freelance setup – mainly making the switch from a Windows based stack to a Mac one. One thing I know for sure is that I need a new workstation. My Sony Windows 8 laptop performs like an absolute dog despite it being less than two years old. It suffers from the Windows 8 issue of 100% disk usage (Google it), which seems to make the whole OS grind to a virtual halt – two complete Windows 8 rebuilds later and I still have the issue. Also, my video card is knackered on the laptop, and every few minutes the screen glitches and I have to hit the top of the keyboard to get the screen to go back to normal. Basically, it’s all a good excuse for me to get some new kit!
I’ve decided to go Mac. The reasons for this are numerous, such as the dev world getting more and more Mac based and me having to run workarounds on a Windows environment to get things like SASS and LESS compilers to work properly. I’m also used to developing on a dual monitor setup, so just using a knackered laptop isn’t going to cut it. Hence me going for the 27 inch iMac beauty. I’m hoping that developing on this will be a breeze, no more twiddling my thumbs as I wait for Photoshop to start, or the screen freezing as I save a SASS file in Sublime.
Also, Macs are cooler. There, I said it.