I suppose that the “Slippery Slope” phenomenon applies to me right now.  A chink in my Apple armor developed some time ago.  Then I got out of the iPhone world all together, which amazed me as much as it did my friends.

The recent maturity of Google’s cloud services (Photos, Drive, Music, etc.) had a considerable hand of this transition.  It’s very hard to argue with free, no matter who you are.

But then you do pay for free.  You pay with your time investment and commitment to the new platform.  For me, that cost has been relatively low.

That brings me to the next big hurdle to topple: OS X and my iMac.

It just suddenly made sense to me to consider the possibility of changing that hardware platform too.  Why not?  When literally all of my documents are cloud-based, I’m free to experiment with any kind of computer.

I’ve been a faithful Apple guy for the better part of 2 decades.  I’ve owned these machines in this order:

  1. PowerMac G4
  2. iMac 24″
  3. Mac Mini Duo
  4. MacBook Pro
  5. MacBook Air

They’ve all been pretty awesome.  But times have changed for me, my interests morphed.  And now?  I changed to an Asus 15″ hybrid laptop.  It’s a beautiful machine.

  • i7 64-bit CPU
  • 8GB RAM
  • nVidia video
  • 1TB hard drive
  • Windows 10.

That last spec is what finally made this all possible.  The Windows 8 debacle proved to be a non-starter for switching from the beautiful, consistent OS X.  But Windows 10 was finally showing itself to be ready to handle my needs.

I’m about a month into this big switch.  So far, I’m loving the choice.  It’s different, but good.  Not everything has been perfectly smooth, but no computer platforms are.

In particular, I really really miss filesystem tagging.  If you use those on OS X, you’ll be sorely disappointed with its lack on NTFS and Windows.  There are of course third party software solutions for this, but I don’t think they will work with Google Drive or Dropbox across other filesystems and operating systems.  For instance, I still work sometimes on my wife’s MacBook, so I need file tagging / coloring to work across them both.

The only solution I can think of is to simply make subfolders for my files.  The layout could look like this:

\Folder\Statements\2015\

…and then inside here, I could put:

\TODO

..and

\DONE

Then I get full syncing across platforms, and most importantly, visibility on where I left off.

Details aside, I’m the first to admit that there’s a certain polish lacking over here on this side of the computer and phone fences.  I miss that homogeneous sheen that OS X and iOS seem to exude.

And yet, for sheer horsepower and agility, I’m really appreciating what Windows 10 and Android devices offer.

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