For a full working week, beginning as of 12:01am Monday the 1st of June, I will abandon my Apple products, casting them to the fortress that is my mother’s house.

Since I purchased my first Mac (a 1.8GHz PowerMac G5) back in late 2002, I haven’t been keeping up with what’s going on in the wider world of consumer technology. Well, except to make fun of the companies that try to compete with Apple’s products. So when it comes to buying gear for my personal use, I’ve simply purchased whatever has an Apple logo on it, because I know it will work with my Apple gear and I’ll know how to use it as it all comes from the same company. And, umm, because it looks pretty and matches with my already existing Apple stuff.

Yes, I am a fanboy – no doubt about it. I love Apple and am totally biased towards their products and the way Apple does things. I own a poster of Steve Jobs for christ’s sake (oh and, erm, run this site). Unlike most fanboys however, I realise I am one. Understanding that I am morphing into what I hate, I decided to force myself out of this white plastic and aluminum coated technological comfort zone and into a black and grey land that is foreign and confusing to me, but the norm for over 90% of the western population.

To do this, I have devised a small experiment, which, like all good plans, was devised in a beer fueled stupor amongst friends. For a full working week, beginning as of 12:01am Monday the 1st of June, I will abandon my Apple products, casting them to the fortress that is my mother’s house. She has been given strict instructions to keep them there and not to let me have them back until 12:01am, Saturday the 6th of June. If I come to the door, crying my eyes out and begging for mercy, she is not to let me touch them. If I threaten to destroy her collection of Andre Rieu DVDs, she is not to let me glimpse upon their precision engineered gaze. Knowing my mother and her love for watching me squirm, I can assure you, there is no way I’m getting anywhere near my Apple gear this week.

To even further push myself into actually using this gear and not just avoiding it for an entire week while I await a return to the motherland, I will be blogging about it here on MacTalk, giving Apple fanboys a view on what life is like on the other side of the technological fence. My aim here isn’t to bash these products, as I already know I’ll prefer the Apple products (that’s why I use them in the first place), but to try and gain a better understanding of the big bad world of tech outside of my little Apple bubble.

The Apple equipment I will relinquish consists of:

• 15″ MacBook Pro (Early 2008) – 2.4Ghz CPU, 4GB RAM, 200GB 7200RPM HDD
• 16GB iPhone 3G
• AirPort Express
• AppleTV 40GB

That stuff will be replaced by (the gear was given to me by the companies to borrow for the week):

• HP Pavilion dv6-1143tx – 2.4Ghz CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB 5400RPM HDD
• RIM Blackberry Bold
• Linksys WRT610N
• TiVo

Join me all this week, where I will blog daily about my experiences in adjusting my workflows, picking up on the differences between the Apple and non-Apple products and answering any questions you might have. And I do look forward to any questions you have and I will try to answer them as best as I can in the following days post. Just comment on this post to ask! Subscribe to MacTalk’s RSS feed to keep abreast of my journey and follow me on Twitter for a real-time and profanity laden version of my experience.