August 30, 2026

Get a MAC in 2026

I have never owned or worked with Apple hardware, but that will change soon. I am entirely fed up with Windows.

I have only run Windows in order to run Adobe photoshop/lightroom. I am not at all fond of Adobe as a business, but there is not question that Lightroom has no peer, and any serious photographer who isn't using it is just wasting time and money.

The straw that broke the camels back was when I recently started up lightroom on my windows PC.

Lightroom tells me an update is available and that I am not up to date.
When I go to install the update, it says "not compatible".
It is not compatible because I am running Windows 10.
I am not running Windows 10 because Microsoft only allows you to run it on certain new processors.
My processor is not among them. My motherboard is a socket LGA1155, and no processor exists that fits into that socket that will run Windows 11.

It goes on and on. My windows advisor advises me to avoid windows 11 at all costs and to thus continue to run old versions of the Adobe products.

I have the exact same Intel i7-3770K in a linux machine that I have running Windows. It runs linux like a dream, it is snappy and nice. I am using it to type this. On the other hand Windows runs slow, and even lightroom takes forever to get started. The system should be entirely idle. Why all this delay and slowness?

On my linux machine (same CPU and memory mind you), I click on a terminal icon and it shows up instantly. I launch QGIS and it is up and running in 5 seconds. On windows, starting things takes close to a minute with this annoying blue spinner letting me know that something is going on somewhere. Why?

Ask your doctor if WINDOWS could be right for you.

The doctor says, "No!" -- Absolutely not.

I could buy a new CPU, motherboard, and of course memory. This would probably cost close to $1000, and then I would be able to run Windows 11, which I have been advised to avoid.

Why would I continue beating my head against the wall and expecting the pain to stop.

ARM vs x86

Here is yet another axe I would enjoy grinding. I have long been disgusted with the x86 architecture. It is true that I rarely do assembly language programming these days, and would certainly avoid doing any more of it on the x86. Once I install linux and program in C, I generally don't care or even know that it is x86 running the show, and it runs pretty well.

But as a matter of principle, the very existence of x86 annoys me. ARM, especially 64 bit ARM is a nice clean architecture. X86 deserves to die and should have died long ago. I think it would have, if not for the crazy insistence by Microsoft to support ancient code. This is one place where Apple does the right thing, despite certain complaints. They know when to burn bridges and move forward (though they do apparently provide the ability to run old x86 code via the "rosetta stone".

Moving to Apple is an opportunity to embrace ARM and to merrily thumb my nose at x86.

Enough is enough

It would be worth at least $500, maybe even $1000, just to get rid of Windows and wipe my hands clean. Add that to the $1000 that I could waste to get new hardware to continue running Windows, and I have a $2000 budget to buy a mac-mini.

You get what you pay for. I could get an entry level M6 Mac mini for $800. But going cheap is stupid, especially if you can afford not to.
I will choose a somwhat decked out M5-Pro model.

Now that this choice is made, I feel like a abused woman feels when she finally gets up and leaves her wife beating drunken husband. Why have I put up with this miserable life for so long? It is so nice to leave all this behind.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!