Here’s to the Crazy ones.

The journey of a Microsoft-became-Apple-became-Google fan’s computer choices. Now I am finally free. And sorry.

I used to be a Microsoft Outlook freak. Now, I said it. I am not ashamed of it even. I loved Outlook back in 2005, and I knew every single shortcut.

But after years of fighting my IT department, we secretly ran with GSuite (the email system formerly known as Google Apps). And with GSuite I no longer needed Windows that bad and 2006 I got a MacBookPro. There were highlights and lowlights. I thought the best part would be that IT would treat me as user-non-grata (“We don’t support Apple or Google products, so you are on your own.”). But the best part was Keynote. Keynote became the extension of my mind. Like a scribble pad, but everything aligned and kerned correctly. And the worst part was naturally that people sent me Microsoft Word and Excel documents. And my computer completely messed them up. And even if I could open and edit them, when I sent them back they were now an unusable version stripped of the creator’s formulae and styling. I was the black sheep on the intranet.

But with the iPhone suddenly the Apple system won the world’s love. Even the IT guys wanted Apple products and started telling everyone that it was built on Unix and way more secure. It took a couple of years and then I could even edit Microsoft documents. But I started noticing that I was living more in the cloud. My photos, pdfs and other files were on Dropbox, and then the rest in GSuite; spreadsheets, documents, and email. The world started to run in the browser, and native apps were less of a thing, so the transition was rather smooth. But not a single hardware manufacturer created as beautiful and solidly built hardware like Apple, so I was still in love with Jobs’ work.

Then came 2016. I think it was an invoice for iCloud. Or that iPhoto was just the slowest beast on the planet, and I moved my images to Google Photos. Or the fact that I wasn’t really using any Apple software (apart from Keynote). Seriously, who needs Mail, Numbers, Pages or iPhoto when there’s much better alternatives? So I bit the bullet and bought a $250 Chromebook. I wanted to prove to myself that I would last without brushed aluminum. At first, it was horrible. The build quality was that of a 2005 Toyota — so plastic. Using Skype as a webapp I couldn’t make the video work. Spotify worked, but kept pestering me about installing Flash without actually needing it. And I had to learn Google Slides! (Keynote on iCloud is, like the rest of iCloud, a joke.)

But soon it dawned on me that everything worked. Two things that were weird. The first was that I couldn’t run video conferences with 6+ participants as my computer only had 4 Gb of memory. The second, and more salient, was that everyone thought I was doing some Waldenish / Spartan experiment.

My greatest discovery was that the world is truly brainwashed by Apple. “There is no alternative to Apple products, as the alternatives are medieval or hacker-boxes.” According to the Apple acolytes. But it seemed ok to me. I got equally or more done. Most apps might be first citizens on Apple systems. Their web versions are inferior at first glance, but seemed to work fine.

I just moved to an HP 360x and run Ubuntu on it. Because I need to do phone conferences with 8+ people and need the memory. If there was a small Chromebook that handled that I would have bought that.
And the biggest change is that I am now OS-open minded. I no longer think that people who run Linux are hackers or privacy buffs. And those who run Windows are not forced by their cheap IT department who can’t afford iProducts. When someone opens a Chromebook, it is not because their MBP is at work and they run their children’s school funded laptop. You can use any computer you want, even if it doesn’t have a touch bar.

The world runs in the browser, and there is no reason to look down on people who don’t buy Apple products. Sorry, everyone I looked down for years. You were the pioneers, the avant-garde, the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.