Making My Escape

Making his escape

The photograph above was taken in Stratford-On-Avon last summer, just down the street from where Shakespeare was born. I hope my escape will be more successful than this poor fox’s, he’s already stuffed. While he failed to dodge the hunter’s dogs and guns, I am making a good run at escaping from Microsoft Windows after 24 years. Yes, I really did use Windows 1.0, I am that old!

The image above is probably the last that I shall process on Windows for I am typing this blog on my new 27 inch screen iMac. If Adobe’s sales staff worked weekends then my old PC would have remained cold and lifeless all day, as it is I must wait until Monday to arrange for my Photoshop “cross grade” license transfer from PC to Mac. Sadly, that is not something you can do online or through Adobe’s support line: Photoshop for the Mac is a different product from Photoshop for Windows. The license keys for one are not recognized by the other and I have to speak to a human sales rep, cap in hand and promising to delete my old copy, to obtain a replacement license. Like any kid with a new toy I am frustrated by the extra wait but at least the transfer is possible, besides, I needed to get the 2009 tax return paperwork done today anyway.

I believe that I will also have to purchase an upgrade from CS3 to CS4 since “cross grades” are only supported for the current version. That’s OK except that Adobe releases new versions about every two years and on that schedule CS5 is due this summer; you can bet that CS5 will come out a couple of weeks too late for me to qualify for a free upgrade. That’s what happened when I had to purchase CS3 because CS2 did not support my then new Nikon D300 RAW file format; CS4 came out 6 weeks later. So it goes.

So why am I moving to a Mac after all this time? Well, there is no one overarching reason but my dissatisfaction with Microsoft has been brewing for many years and the break would have come much sooner if Macs were just a little cheaper. My old 21″ Samsung 213T is failing with numerous vertical purple lines spoiling the picture and making calibration impossible, my PC is not quite as old but definitely showing its age. The need to replace both at the same time lowered the bar and a generous subsidy from my father gave me the extra lift to get over it (I am glad that parents never stop being parents even when you are old enough to have used Windows 1.0 and worry about paying for college for your own kids).

The 27″ screen was definitely a significant seduction factor; seduction is the operative word for there really is nothing that you can do on a Mac that you can’t do on a PC. I worried long and hard about whether the glossy surface of the huge monitor would be a problem for photo editing? To my great relief it’s not, at least not in my north facing home office but your mileage may vary considerably if you work in a brighter room. I can avoid or limit the impact of most reflections; if I were sitting with my back to the window it would be a different story.

It’s late, I have to stop caressing my new love’s keys and turn in before my wife gets too jealous and regrets allowing me to have it.