I remember walking in to Seedcamp Week Berlin and shamefully turning on my 4 year old Packard Bell laptop in a sea of Macs. Similarly, if you walk in to Red Rock Cafe in Mountain View, or St Oberholz in Berlin, 90% of the people there are using a Macbook. It seems that Macs rules startups.
Yet a few years ago I remember reading a blogpost where some Venture Capitalist said that if he ever walked in to a startup’s office and all the employees were working on Apple computers, he would walk straight out and never make an investment. The argument being that such a startup clearly did not know how to spend wisely.
At the time I pretty much agreed with him, and always figured if I ever had a startup I would frugally equip the company employees with the very best of Dell.
Over the past six months, I’ve come to realise how wrong both I, and the long-forgotten-to-remain-nameless VC, have been.
Early last year when my trusty, but under-powered Windows 7 Packard Bell laptop died, I dutifully popped along to PC World to buy a new laptop. They barely had any stock, but I had no choice – I needed a computer that day and PC World is usually your only option for a same-day computer purchase. So I walked away with a HP laptop, equipped with Windows 8, and most importantly to me – a promised 5-7 hour battery life.
After only about a week I took the laptop back, because I assumed the battery was defective; it would only ever last about 2.5 hours, meaning after half a morning working somewhere remote I would already be getting battery warnings. Well, it turns the battery is not defective, it is just crap. I don’t know what they have done to Windows 8 to make it such an energy hog, but there is no way that thing would ever get 8 hours battery life unless I used it Jedi-style with the screen switched off and no WiFi.
Every time I moaned about it on Twitter the poor HP social media folk would direct me towards the same “Improving battery performance” page on the HP website, where the guidance to extend battery life is basically to not use the laptop.
The other small issue is Windows 8. I thought it would just take a little getting used to. Nope. Windows 8 sucks. It sucks bad. I can scarcely believe that a company that employs actual professionals to make products to be used by consumers, could make something so fundamentally unintuitive and unusable.
I could have just about lived with these problems if I was ignorant about the grass on the other side of the fence. But nope, with a Apple fanboi co-founder that was never going to be a possibility. I could see him smirking every time I had to reach for the powerpack for my laptop, while he would complain “oh, I’ve been using my Macbook for half the day and it only has 5 hours battery left. What should I do?”
The final straw was when I met some investors the other day and they were genuinely shocked that I didn’t have a Mac. Clearly not the guy I quoted from the blogpost.
So the other day I picked up a 14″ Macbook Air from Gatwick airport. It was about £120 cheaper than buying it elsewhere and knocking off VAT makes it about the same price as my rubbish HP laptop.
Experience since using it? Amazing. Battery life seems to be a genuine 11h. So refreshing not to have to keep one eye on the battery indicator and have the power pack nearby at all times. Size – it’s so light. Everything about it feels better. The touchpad is amazing and the multi-finger swiping feels instinctive almost straightaway. I won’t go on about how good it is, but the most important thing is that I already feel more efficient… and I also don’t get rage at my laptop like I did with the HP.
So, thanks to the combined crapiness of HP laptops and Windows 8 user experience I am now ex-Windows and pro-Mac. Even if they costs a little more, Macs seem to make it up with value.
Now if anyone can tell me why it would ever be worth a business paying £900 for a Mac Thunderbolt display rather than a £150 Dell screen, I’m all ears.
The wannabe VC 