How annoying! I’d barely had my new MacBook Pro for a few weeks when the hard drive broke. While it was running, my two-year-old niece Hilke accidentally gave the computer a pretty good knock. Well, hardly any hard drive can withstand that, whether in a PC or a Mac.

In the short time it was still running, I would have hoped for a bit more speed from this machine. The MacOS X operating system on a 2.16 GHz Intel CoreDuo processor with 2 GB RAM initially felt just as sluggish as Windows XP on a 1 GHz Athlon with 500 MB RAM. But just as the perceived temperatures do not always match the actual physical conditions, the perceived speed does not always correspond to the benchmark values.

Of course, the benchmarks speak a clear language in favour of the Mac. I’m looking forward to seeing the laptop’s considerable heat radiation when playing Half Life 2 when the device hopefully returns from the workshop soon.

post 2012-04: Almost six years have passed and I’m still using the same Mac. My satisfaction is now considerably greater than in the early days. The initial frustration was probably more due to the broken hard drive. To this day, no virus has infected this operating system - the hassle saved and the time saved are worth their weight in gold. The programmes are more intuitive than their Windows counterparts and since iOS has been available for mobile devices, it’s twice as much fun.