The apple of my eye.

 So my Christmas shopping has started in traditional style.

It's not unknown that on my first day of Christmas retail I set off out into the December melee clutching my list determined to come home with as many parcels as I can. It's not unknown that in the first batch of parcels there will be gifts for myself.

Much as though I enjoy buying presents for others, there is no delight that ranks alongside treating oneself.

This year I've done it in style. It's five years since my Damascene conversion to the world of Apple. Prior to early 2007, I would scoff at friends who as far as I was concerned were lagging behind in the  technological revolution clinging to their Apple Macs. Yes, they were colourful. Yes, they looked good. But the PC was where it was all that. Or so I thought!

In early 2007 I joined the show "Peep Show". At the same time as I formed a tentative working relationship with the lovely David Mitchell and Robert Webb, I couldn't avoid seeing their faces everywhere I went as the frontmen of the new Apple campaign. You may remember it "I'm a PC - I'm a Mac". It put the thought of the Apple Mac into my mind and when a couple of weeks later my Sony VAIO laptop finally gave up the ghost, and I found myself in the duty free shopping at Gatwick on a Sunday afternoon, the decision to purchase a white MacBook was not a difficult one.

I have never looked back. It took me five minutes to setup the MacBook in a hotel room in Cologne, connecting instantly to the Wi-Fi, and setting up my email. I loved it and began to spend more time on it at home than I did on my ailing PC. That Christmas, while hosting a Moulin Rouge party at the Cafe de  Paris, I ventured  out from rehearsals and,for the first time, into the hallowed temples of the Apple Store on Regent Street and bought myself an iMac.  They are beautifully and securely packed, but even so the assistant insisted on carrying it all the way down to my hotel in Leicester Square for me. That level of customer service is something I think  Apple have always been able to maintain, and on visits to the Apple Store since with cracked iPhones (thanks Charlie Baker), recalcitrant MacBooks or whatever, the service has been of the highest order.

The next Christmas  Rich converted to Mac for home use. A couple of months later he was flying across the Atlantic watching a movie when the person sitting beside him (in business class of course) decided to have a dislocated knee. In the confusion that followed the power cord was yanked out of Richards MacBook and for some reason the hard drive gave  decided to die. Not the best thing when you're heading into Boston for a three-day business trip. He rang me from his hotel. I was in a hotel in Birmingham at the time filming  "Doctors," but I was able to logon to the concierge service with his ID, find an Apple Store in Boston,  book him an appointment for that evening, and relay the details to him. He took his MacBook in, and they returned it to in the next morning with a new hard drive and working perfectly.

I'm hoping Santa will be bringing me a new iPhone this Christmas. A white 16 GB one Santa, if you're reading this. My main present to myself however  I've already bought. A brand-new 21 inch  state-of-the-art iMac.

I ordered it on Saturday afternoon at 3:30 PM and it was delivered by courier first thing  Monday morning at 10:15 AM . It was up and running 15 minutes later and I plugged a hard drive into it with a backup for my existing Mac, and within an hour it had all my emails documents, programs, applications up running and ready to go. It's thin, it's gorgeous, and I love it. One of the first major tasks to do on it is the editing of the first draft of my book. It's come back from the publishers with great feedback and a lot of praise, but also an awful lot of blue biro emendations  that I have to consider whether or not to put into the final text. I also obviously have to go on a residential learning course to improve my use of the comma.  Quite frankly some of my usage of the aforementioned  punctuation mark is lamentable. So a lot of learning will be done, and one particular key on my new wireless keyboard will be receiving more work than the others.

The higher  resolution retina display is a joy to see my words displayed on. Now, since the advent of the iPhone and the iPad, Apple is the product to have. Even hardened PC users find it difficult to deny the usefulness and the sheer joy of  the iPad. To have already been in the Apple camp before these amazing, iconic products were released gave us one a smug sense of satisfaction. It may have taken me time, but having made the change,  I have never looked back. Sitting in front of a PC now I feel clunky and at a loss.

The main benefit of  Apple has always been that they make both the hardware and the software, so they take responsibility for it. I cannot recount the number of times when a program would go wrong on my PC when Microsoft would say that you had to contact the computer manufacturers, and the computer manufacturers would say that I had to contact Microsoft. Apple is, in every sense of the word, (note clever use of punctuation there on the sub clause) a one-stop shop.

And it's certainly a shop that I'll be making one stop at again this Christmas.