Are you happy with your Mac?

So, there I am. Sitting on a train from London back to the Cotswolds. In the carriage are the normal commuters and day trippers, settling in for the couple of hours journey. On display the normal range of PC laptops, busy doing their daily duty, spreading sheets and wording docs. In such a situation you know that by pulling out a Powerbook you are instantly standing out from the crowd, but that's not what I'm concerned about here. After all we all know the Powerbook is the worlds most stylish laptop (well apart from the Air), but is there more to it than style. Of course there is.

As I tapped away on my machine, the passenger next to me reached into his bag, and lo, he too opened up a powerbook. Now two mac owners, sitting next to each other on a train for a couple of hours. They're going to chat, right? And what the other Powerbook owner had to say was both an interesting insight into the benifits of MAc ownership and a confirmation of much of what being a Mac owner is actually all about.

Other Mac owner it turned out worked in a city investmetn institution. Slaved to his windows laptop, the advent of the Intel Mac meant that he was able to requisition a Powerbook for work and by running XP on his windows partition was able to fit right in with his company's windows only policy. But in the evening he was able to reboot into OS X and explore.

As a result of access to applications such as iPhoto, he was inspired to purchase a pro sumer DSLR camera. He was happy to show me the results of his work and was enthusiastic and committed to learning and developing as a photographer. Something that many years of PC owning had failed to ignite in him.

And that is probably Mac ownership in a nutshell. The machine allows you access to your own creativity and makes the development of creative skills easier and more intuitive. This not only means that you get more from your computer, but far more importantly get more from your life away from the computer.

So not every Mac will inspire it's owner this way, but it's my intuition that a fair few do. And that's got to be worth more than a few extra spreadsheets any day.