Hell Froze Over: Kate Switched Back To The Mac

What goes around comes around. Last year, Mac360’s Kate MacKenzie gave up her Macs and switched to an HP Windows Vista PC.

Apparently all went well for a long time. Months, maybe. As of this weekend, Kate has ditched her defective Windows PC and switched back to her Mac.

What happened? What was so bad about living with a Mac that it would cause a long-time Mac user’s hair to catch on fire and defect to the dark side?

I loathe Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates. I scoffed at Windows users feeble attempts to justify their platform of choice. I convinced many friends, family members, and co-workers to switch to the Mac.

Does that sound like a WIndows user? She chronicled her experience on PixoBebo. It seems that Kate had a series of hardware problems at about the same time as Apple was fomenting an unusual number of software problems on their users.

That caused a simple attitude change.

How is Apple different from Microsoft? Frankly, these days, not so much. Apple’s famed quality and reliability seems to have gone the way of the PowerPC chip; a fond memory. Mac OS X Leopard is less dependable and stable than Tiger and Panther before.

Some of her quotes from last year’s breakup are priceless. This is the 21st century and everything we say and do shows up somewhere to come back and take a bit of the posterior for posterity.

What used to ‘just work’ no longer does. In fact, almost everything Apple touches these days has blemishes of Microsoftian proportions.

When things go wrong, sometimes the best approach is a direct approach. In this case, Kate managed an open letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs:

“Dear Steve, Slow down a little. Everything is going Apple’s way these days. Mac sales are on fire. iPods rule the portable music player world. The iTunes Store dominates online media buying. The iPhone is ultra cool and has shaken the staid cell phone industry. In the rush to move into new markets and produce more insanely great products, Apple has completely forgotten how to do what it once did so well. Whatever you’re doing, make it ‘just work’, like it used to.”

You can see where this is going, right? Kate’s infamous “Goodbye Mac...” missive brought a collective shaking of the head from Mac users all over the country.

Then, our former Mac user dropped off the radar screen for many, many months. She bought an HP PC running Windows Vista and we never heard from her again until this past weekend.

What happened? A change of heart? Hardware? Software? Get a Mac television commercials? All that and more? No, it was simple. The PC experience just does not compute or compete.

Kate MacKenzie, long-time Mac user, Mac promoter, and observer of all things Apple, admitted that she’d made a mistake.

Her leaving the Mac for Windows was a bitter pill to swallow, only matched or exceeded by the plate of crow she gobbled down this weekend. What happened to Windows to cause a switch back?

It just goes sour, which leaves users with a bitter taste, and few options. In other words, my Windows PC started a series of strange behaviors. Crashing. Freezing. Caustic behavior, you know? Hardware? HP support said it was Windows. Software? Microsoft support said it was hardware so call HP. My nearby IT guy simply shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Stuff happens in Windows.’

I understand. Welcome home, Kate.