Retiring PC and Starting Life with an Apple MacBook

By Julio Martinez

A few weeks ago I was the pity magnet of my workplace. My four-year-old Lenovo ThinkPad T510 was treated as the ugly duckling among my colleagues’ silky-slick, newer laptop models.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the Lenovo ThinkPad… that is, four years ago. But by now, it was like an ailing creature wishing to die. It had a battery capacity of roughly forty seconds. I could go down four stories, grab lunch, take the stairs back up and it would still be booting. I’m more familiar with the “loading” cursor than I am with my spouse’s face. And to top it all off, an attractive stripe of (dead pixels? I really don’t know) was starting to spread down the middle of my screen, swallowing up the visibility.

It was time for a break-up and a fresh new start. It didn’t take much online research until my jaw dropped on the keyboard. My my my, how things had changed for Windows in the last four years. That amount of money before paying to install Microsoft Office? I wanted a career companion. Something I could whip out when an opportunity arose or a deadline called. Where was I going to find it?

Well, as it turns out, I took a bite of the Apple. Yours truly is a person who’s never purchased a single product on iTunes in their whole life, has never handled an iPod and… Steve Jobs who?

It was all unfamiliar territory for me. But after getting my Russian undergraduate friend to pretend to be my sister (despite her accent) to buy it under her name for a hefty student discount, I left the Apple Store with a shiny new MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display

What convinced me to switch? An ultra-fast processor, and the promise it would last twice as long as a Windows PC. Yes, I did experience an existential crisis deciding between this and MacBook Air, but you know what – an investment is an investment and the amount of RAM in the Pro Retina is blowing me away.

Am I happy with my choice? Yes. Would I advise something similar for you? Yes. I’m talking to the readers who, like me, are looking for a career companion. Don’t let your choice limit you. Variety is key. Who knew, for example, that I’d been using my laptop not just for simple word processing but also video editing and binary options trading?

Gadgets and technology are not and should not become your life – but they can aid your lifestyle and career in a positive way by opening up more options for how you make your money. Armed with a speedy new computer, I no longer needed extreme patience just to visit websites. Not everything loaded so quickly!

For example, thanks to my slick new MacBook I would find myself making quite a bit of cash on the side by investing in the stock market. Sure, you don’t need a Mac to experience online investing, but as a first-timer who stumbled onto introductory websites like binaryoptions.net without knowing a thing, I felt so much more comfortable doing so on a device that didn’t pause to think about every click you made – and can actually, you know, handle several applications at the same time – allowing me to tweak a document at the same time as I earning money trading.

As a now self-titled online investing aficionado thanks to the ease of websites like Binary Options, I advise you, if you’re an iPhobe like me, to take the risk and make the jump to Apple. It opened doors for me. One other secret – pretty as it is, I didn’t choose MacBook Pro with Retina Display over the Macbook Pro for its screen. It’s just… lighter. This lets me take it everywhere, which means I’m taking opportunity along for a ride.