The iPad halo effect on Mac sales is real, but so is the fact that Apple's flagship has come a long way under Steve Jobs.

The first step to converting (Photo: Guillermo R. Loizaga/Flickr)

There are certain things you don't admit out loud when you live and work in Silicon Valley, as I have for nearly 15 years. One of them is that you're a PC user -- by choice.

You see, Fortune is a Mac shop. (At least that's true on the "creative" side; the business folks need their PCs for whatever it is that business folks do.) But I didn't go for Macs. When I arrived in 2002 I politely insisted on being issued a PC laptop. Other than college and for a few brief years later, I'd never used a Mac. I didn't understand where anything was, applications I'd grown used to didn't work. It was too cute and too frustrating. Fortune granted my request, and for quite a few years I used a perfectly decent IBM Thinkpad, followed by an increasingly disappointing Dell Latitude.

I still use that Dell (DELL) for work. But a funny thing happened to this PC holdout. First I got an iPod, exposing me to iTunes, then, more recently an iPad. Along the way, Fortune made it more difficult for me to use my work computer for my personal needs for perfectly understandable reasons: The company doesn't want me plugging my personal devices -- which might well contain viruses -- into the corporate network. More