Eating the Apple

I flipped to using an iMac as my main machine

I’ve been using an i9 27" iMac since the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown. Here’s why.

I’ve never been a Windows user. Don’t like the platform, don’t like the software. I thought I’d put the out there first.

My first computers were a Sinclair ZX81 followed by a couple of Sinclair Spectrums. I then adopted the Commodore Amiga platform in the nineties before swapping to Linux in the early noughties.

Up until this year, 2020, Linux has been the platform on which I’ve done everything. Literally everything. However, in that time, Apple has risen to prominence and is now probably the automatic choice for creatives.

I dabbled with a few low-powered MacBooks to complement my Linux desktop machine before, in 2012, taking a job at a WordPress company in Leeds specialising in paywall software. I was given a 13" MacBook and then later a 27" iMac. The iMac, although moderately specced, was rather lovely and MASSIVE (to me, at the time.)

The WordPress company folded after I’d been with them 12 months but not before I’d bought my work MacBook. That machine became my mobile computer but my Linux PC remained the box I sat down in front of every morning.

The MacBook curled up its toes during what I think was a power surge in 2014 and so from that point until this April, I remained loyal to my 2009 Linux installed AMD powered PC. Powerful when I bought it, not so much in 2020.

I started researching a new PC purchase towards the back end of 2019. The choices were going to be restricted to the most powerful AMD Ryzen powered machine I could afford with some flavour of Linux installed, probably Arch.

There was one little nagging thought in my mind. Should I consider a different machine, such as a Mac?

Over the past three or four years I’ve been using creative software a lot more. So Kdenlive for video, GIMP for photo manipulation, Inkscape for vector graphics and Scribus for DTP. I wondered if I should consider taking advantage of some of the sexy creative suites that would be available to me on the Mac platform.

I thought long and hard about which way to go but eventually decided to go with a Mac. I maxed out the options apart from RAM and ended up with my i9 27" iMac with the better graphics options. I bought some third party RAM modules off Amazon to push me out to 64G and it all arrived in early April.

Yup, a Ryzen machine would have been faster but I wouldn’t have had the same software options under Linux.

I now have the Affinity creative suite and DaVinci Resolve video editor. I replaced Zsh with Fish in my Mac terminal (iTerm) and I’ve installed HomeBrew for all my favourite tools. I still have my Linux PC on my network as well as a little under-the-desk server running Ubuntu.

I see the three machines as one environment to carry out any task I want and I couldn’t be happier.

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