I had the pleasure of having Chris Fraser (@CoureurDeNuage) from EMC in town last week and as we travelled between meetings it became apparent why a number of “professional travelers” have moved over to MacBooks.
The first thing that caught my eye was the sheer size and weight of his device. As we sat in Starbucks, Chris was able to pull out his MacBook from his bag, balance it on one knee, drink his coffee and carry on a conversation with me, while I was still struggling to pull my ThinkPad from my bag.
Once my ThinkPad was out of the bag, it was time to clear the spot on the table to fit this mammoth heavy beast that I call my laptop. I sat back and watched Chris clack away on his keyboard (still balancing it on his knee) while I was smashing the keys on the keyboard trying to wake mine from sleep. By this point Chris had sent me 2 emails with information that we had discussed earlier in the day.
I asked Chris if he had any issues connecting to the Wi-Fi, he said it was slow (we were in a really busy Starbucks) but he had no issues connecting. So after I disabled and re-enabled the Wi-Fi a couple of times with no success it was time for a reboot (which is normal for me after taking my laptop out of sleep).
Luckily I got a phone call as I was waiting for my laptop to reboot so the time it didn’t seem drag on too long, but knowing full well that it was at least 2 minutes for the whole process to finish. As I got off the phone I looked at the time and decided it was time to move on to our next meeting. Chris snapped his MacBook closed and slide it effortlessly into his bag and was up and ready to go, I on the other had had decided to fully shut down my ThinkPad so I didn’t have Wi-Fi issues the next time we stopped somewhere to get some quick work done. The whole shutdown process and then having to fight to get the ThinkPad back into my backpack took a number of minutes but then we were on our way.
As we were leaving I was thinking to myself, in the 20 minutes we were in the coffee shop, Chris was productive for close to 18 of those minutes, while I was productive on my laptop for none (I guess if I didn’t take that phone call I may of been able to get my laptop up and running for 2 or 3 minutes)
For those of you who know me well you are probably asking “Why wasn’t Mike using his iPad, he never leaves home without it” and that is a fair question. When I was on the private side of IT I only traveled with my iPad because I never had to do much more than send out a few emails or create a word document, but now that I am on the dark side, I have to use a number of websites for configurations and pricing that do not work with the iPad browsers (or at least do not work well) and I spend the majority of my time in spreadsheets working with formulas and pricing, again which isn’t the greatest on the iPad.
I’m not saying that a MacBook will cure all my technology and productivity issues, but from this experience (and the same scenario plays out almost every time I sit down to do some work when I am not in one of my offices) it is defiantly worth investigating a move to a MacBook.
No comments:
Post a Comment