Apple Kit @ the Apple Harvest

This probably should have been my first blog entry as it sets the context for everything that is going to follow. But never mind, it's only a day late!

First a confession; I'm a relative newcomer into the world in which the Apple Harvest is set. Although I've secretly admired the Mac ever since it was first introduced into the orchard, I've been a PC user since they first became available in the UK back in the early 1980s. I left university (with a degree in Agricultural Science) and started life as a professional programmer - so my choice of platform was dictated by the demands of my employers and their clients.

Since then, my professional life has moved from pure software development, initially towards project management, then into software process improvement, and I now act as an independent management consultant, focusing on business and software process management, with a particular emphasis on organisational change management.

Two years ago I was working in Oslo in Norway, and dragging my relatively new Asus R1F tablet PC backwards and forwards. I was getting increasingly frustrated with the time it took to boot and to actually be able to do anything useful, not to mention the short battery life. I had a bit of disposable income at the time, so I decided to purchase a 15-inch MacBook Pro laptop, running at 2.4GHz, with a 150Gb disk and 4Gb of RAM. The time of purchase coincided with the release of Leopard. I became an instant convert.

Six months later I replaced my desktop (actually it was a permanently docked HP nx6325 laptop) with a 3.06GHz, 24-inch iMac,with 4Gb RAM and a 500Gb disk.

Earlier this year I replaced my Windows smart phone (which I've been using since the Orange SPV smart phone was first launched) with a 16Gb iPhone 3G, and somewhere along the line I ditched my Creative Zen-M 60Gb player for a 16Gb iPod Touch.

You could almost say that I'm now a fully reformed PC user, but unfortunately I still live in the real world, where my clients still demand PC compatibility, so I keep a copy of Parallels 4 with Windows XP for such situations. However, I do find I'm using it less and less, which is a blessing.

So there you have it. These are my credentials for writing about Apple kit in a public place. I may not win any awards for longevity in the Apple community, but I've certainly put my share of investment into my Apple kit and software over the past couple of years. And no doubt will continue to do so for the next few years...

In forthcoming blogs I'll tell you something about the software I use.