I need some help. Mac or PC?

My MacBook’s days are numbered. The arrow keys have stopped working and the battery overheats which slows the machine down to a painful crawl. Do I replace it with another MacBook or do I switch to a laptop?

Pro or Envy?

At work I use a Dell desktop and at home I use my dying MacBook. This setup has been beneficial as it means I am constantly testing Clear Books on the two main operating systems used by our customers.

Operating Systems

Here’s the breakdown. In the blue corner we have Windows winning with 69% and in the green corner we have Macintosh with a respectable 25%.

Browsers

When in the office, on the Dell, I use Internet Explorer a fair bit (gasp). Internet Explorer is the main reason I use a PC and recently I even turned down a spare iMac because no one else in the office likes Internet Explorer. It’s down to me to represent, on a regular basis, all the non techies who use Clear Books.

Here’s the breakdown of our customers by browser: Chrome 33%, Firefox 26%, Internet Explorer 26%, Safari 15%.

I am debating switching to a laptop because I am more comfortable with the development tools on a PC as I am using them throughout the day in the office (e.g. WAMP server, Tortoise GIT, PHP Storm) .

So which wins? The MacBook and cross OS/Browser testing or the PC and a favoured development environment?

Posted by Tim Fouracre

Tim founded Clear Books in 2008. Like many small business owners he worked from home for 15 months to get his startup off the ground. Today Tim enjoys helping Clear Books, its customers and its growing team innovate and achieve. Tim did his GCE O Levels in Ghana.

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7 Comments

  1. Tim Fouracre 12th January 2012 at 7:10 pm

    Thanks Craig
    Mac 1 – 0 PC it is then 🙂

    VM is a good idea. As you say the cost of taking an already more expensive Mac and adding on all the Windows software you need does start adding up though.

  2. Tim Fouracre 12th January 2012 at 7:12 pm

    Peter, 2-0 to the Mac. I anticipated this happening!

  3. Tim Fouracre 12th January 2012 at 7:23 pm

    Kaziu makes it 3-0 to Mac.

    I actually walked into a PC World this afternoon and was fairly set on getting the HP Envy Beats. After a couple of trips between the MacBooks and laptops, the assistant I approached to make a purchase was already busy with a customer so I walked out.

    Maybe it was fate!

  4. Paul Maunders 12th January 2012 at 10:05 pm

    Get a new MacBook Air, you’ll love it!

    Whatever you do decide on, make sure it has an SSD!

  5. Tim Fouracre 13th January 2012 at 7:29 am

    Andrew, you are a lone voice!

    Simon, Paul and Ben make it 6-1 to the Mac although from the sounds of it I think Simon’s girlfriend might veto his vote.

  6. Chris Caspell 14th January 2012 at 8:40 am

    Another vote for the mac Tim; wow this is turning into a Mac-fanboy convention! I need to use windows for my accounting software (Sage, Iris, TaxCalc) all of which are not available on OsX. I travel a lot so I went down the route of having a Sony Vaio and my iMac but it was quite unsatisfactory as my paperless office software wasn’t with me so I felt out of control when I was on the road.

    In May 2011 I bit the bullet and bought (at the time) the latest and fastest MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and a 2.3Ghz i7 processor. I use parallels and it was the best thing I ever could have done.

    HD space while travelling is not an issue for me – I use dropbox and all my music, films etc stay on my home iMac which has disk storage hanging off it. Now that I know that I really do not need more than 250GB, next time I will get the MacBook Air for the weight saving. Apart from that I have no regrets at all.

  7. Tim Fouracre 18th January 2012 at 9:43 am

    Thanks for the feedback everyone.

    I bowed to the pressure and went for a MacBook Air although there is clearly something wrong with my installation of Photo Booth…

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/clearbooks/6719274857/in/photostream

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