Apple hit an all time high today (stock: AAPL) after analysts upgraded the stock after looking at demand, not for iPhones and iPods, but for Macs. And I can tell you, after my personal experience this weekend that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
So I'm presenting onstage at the DEMO conference in San Diego this week and I needed the fastest Vista laptop I could find so our software would demo the best. I ended up with a new Sony Vaio with dual 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo processors and 2GB of RAM. But it came with so much junk on it I had to spend about 8 hours just uninstalling things I would never use to make it as fast as possible. Here's the clincher. Our software kept crashing on it thanks to some new hybrid hard drive and hybrid video card technology we've never seen before (and Sony doesn't even document.) I spent another day trying to get it to work. Luckily (I thought) I paid an additional $29 for pre-made Vista restore disks from the Sony Store where I bought the laptop. But here's the next clincher. They didn't work. So now I have a $2500 paperweight.
In the meantime I got my MacBook Pro running Boot Camp going as a backup. Then I started configuring another Vista laptop (another Sony) but it didn't have video drivers that work with Vista. So I can't bring that. Finally, I decide that I'll buy another PC in San Diego when I arrive. So I pay a cab driver $80 to take me to Circuit City where I purchase another Vista laptop, this time an HP. And you guessed it - it crashes running Vista - choking on just the software it came with! I never got to install our software.
So now this demo will take place this Weds. at 8:55 am PDT and I'm planning on using the MacBook Pro I'm writing this post on. Once again the Mac comes to the rescue.
This isn't just a rant against Vista. It's a recognition that even an unsupported configuration (Boot Camp beta) running on a Mac is a better machine than the best laptops that money can buy. The analysts are just starting to realize this. The rest of the world will take note soon.
