Considering a Mac
Okay, I know it’s kind of a bugger considering how anti-Apple I’ve always been, but I’m actually considering getting a Mac in the coming years. What tipped the scale? Well, for me two things: the Apple migration to Intel chips, and Apple’s official introduction of a two-button mouse.
First, the migration to Intel chips will no longer mean that Apple is using a chip that, either perceptibly or actually, lags behind geek-household names such as Intel and AMD. Although clock speed really can’t be used as a determinant of a chip’s performance these days, it also means that Macs won’t be grossly under clocked. It opens up a whole new world for software cross-platform capability that Mac up until now has not had.
Secondly, I’ve always hated the fact that Mac only shipped with a single-button mouse. Those things were horribly unusable, and it has always brought down storms of shame on Apple in my eyes for a company that deems to value usability as one of its driving goals to provide a single button mouse. Those in the Mac camp will say that a single button mouse promotes greater usability because it forces developers to not be lazy and create a context menu for every function, forces them to think through their interface in greater detail. But that really never held much water with me. I know the Mighty Mouse isn’t sold standard (yet), but just the fact that Apple officially supports a two-button mouse means a lot to me.
For a bit of background, I haven’t used a Mac since I graduated from Louisiana College in 2002. The college had the lowest common denominator in PowerMacs for teachers, editors, and such, and a whole slew of multicolored iMacs for general student use, all running OS 9. They were about as useful as paperweights, and we would pass around paper clips (which were used to reboot the things) as so much starved junkies because our systems would lock up so much. A video parody of the “Switch” advertising campaign sums it up perfectly.
But now, five years after OS X hit the market, I find myself seriously considering it. As I look closer at Mac, I’m realizing that it really is exactly what I have been trying to see (or trying to create) in Linux. Let me name the reasons:
- Apple is extremely open source friendly, having many of their components, including the core engine and HTML rendering engine, open sourced.
- Apple provides high quality software to keep organized and simply get things done, including organizational tools, photo manager, video editor, audio editor, dvd viewer, dvd/cd burner, word processor, and so many others. Plus it produces PDF’s and syncs with your Palm, all out of the box! That seems refreshing from the savage land of Microsoft and certainly Linux OSes.
- It’s extremely stable, being based on UNIX and all.
- It provides features that have become so much vaporware from the Microsoft camp. Longhorn/Vista has been pushed back so much, and so many of its initial promises have been dropped or reduced. Whereas, Mac OS X has always had the fancy vector-based accelerated user interface, and has consistently released a point version of OS X nearly every year since OS X first came out, which has either met or exceeded Microsoft’s promises.
- Further to the previous point, Apple has had features in its OS X software that Microsoft is only now beginning to clone. What’s more, Apple has gotten faster and faster, performance-wise, with every release, while Microsoft is only promising that you’ll have to have a computer manufactured new today in order to run Windows well when it comes out in a year.
- Since Apple controls the hardware, it’s guaranteed to run well.
- Apple seems to care about its customers more. I don’t see any other company so concerned with making sure that its monitor will work with the OS to produce accurate colors on screen as well as print, etc.
- Apple is socially responsible. Do a search on Google for Microsoft and Global Environment, and all you get is some prattle about competitiveness.
- Software a-plenty! Fedora ships with access to about 5,000 apps. Ubuntu just over 3,000 without digging into Universe. Mandriva and Suse, both about 4,000. Debian itself claims over 17,000. Mac OS sports the availability of more than 23,000 applications.
In short, Apple is a perfect blend of quality, philosophy, open standards, and function. No longer do I hold the opinion that the only thing that an Apple computer will do is look pretty. So, next Christmas or so after Leopard comes out and the Mactels are more firmly established, I’m looking to get myself an iBook or iMac.
My plan now is to slowly migrate myself to programs that are cross platform. That shouldn’t be so difficult since I’m an open source aficionado anyway. Specifically though, I noticed that there is a Mac version of Quicken, so next year when my MS Money 2004 gets too old to use, I’ll go with Quicken instead of Money. Heh, try finding a financial manager for Linux! The typical response is, and I kid you not, “Whoah, you have a financial life?” For my Flight Sim fix, I’m going to give X-Plane a whirl. It has always lagged far behind Microsoft in terms of visual quality, but the latest version has some very promising screenshots. X-Plane has never positioned itself as being a visual creature, instead focusing on realism of flight model, as noted on a recent news article posted on Apple. It’s catching up though.
Whew, sorry for the lengthy post (assuming anyone has read it).