Sure, it may be overstating things to call Redditor gnophy a former “Mac hater.” After all, he only said he used to be “anti-Mac” and he “couldn’t get along with the OS.”
Well, good news for Apple. He’s finally been assimilated. And it only took many, many years to subdue the software engineer and musician.
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Now he loves his dual 2020 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops (one for him, one for work), his 2021 M1 Mac mini with 16GB of unified memory and his 2019 11-inch iPad Pro.
He hates his Magic Mouse, he said, but it was free, so what’s he going to do?
With his machines, gnophy enjoys an LG QHD monitor for gaming and a BenQ 4K monitor for photo and video editing — both of them 32-inch displays.
Confessions of a man in ‘jail’
A running joke among comments in gnophy’s post is that by locking himself into more Apple hardware and software — the Apple ecosystem — he’s put himself in jail.
“You went to jail and like it there,” said one comment.
“Went directly to jail, did not pass go, no regrets,” replied gnophy.
“More like house arrest [in] a large mansion,” encouraged another.
The post’s commenters discussed the stability and good looks of macOS as well as Apple hardware versus the less stability and greater “tinkering” potential folks see in working directly in Windows and Linux on PCs.
A long journey to ‘it just works’
For gnophy, it all started when he was “trying to be an edgy teen” wanting not to follow the iPod-loving pack. He went from Creative Zens and Microsoft Zunes straight to PC games and figured he’d never look back to OSX and its “closed system.”
And for a while, he didn’t. In college he had all Android phones and loved to customize them. In his electrical engineering studies, he used Windows-based machines, so “I just continued on my merry way,” he said.
But after college, things started to change. Just a little. He got into music production and bought a 15-inch MacBook Retina in 2012. But after ages of using Windows, he “couldn’t get along with” Mac OS X. “I ended up giving that laptop to my sister,” he said
And then it happened
Finally, work intervened. In 2017, he switched from electrical engineering to software work and his job issued him a MacBook Pro.
“From there I started really liking the OS for its native terminal and finally stopped trying to use it like a Windows machine after seeing the ways my coworkers interacted with them,” he said.
At the time, as he worked on building a new gaming rig, he decided to create a dual-booted Hackintosh to use the MacOS for productivity: photo and video editing, music production and programming.
Too late to turn back; how about an M1 Mac mini?
By then it may have already been too late to turn back.
In 2019, gnophy bought an iPad Pro for writing notes by hand and editing photos while traveling. He transitioned more into casual gaming.
And then, with most of his spent time on Apple devices, he went “full in,” he said.
To “close the loop,” he described switching from a Google Pixel 2XL smartphone to an iPhone 12 Pro. Then, just a few weeks ago, he purchased an M1 Mac mini to replace his hobbled Hackintosh (“stuck on High Sierra because of the Nvidia GPU, damn you Apple,” he lamented).
“As I’ve gotten older I’ve found myself preferring the ‘it just works’ mentality over the endless tinkering and customization I would do on Windows and Android,” gnophy confessed.
It could happen to anybody.
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