Living with a Mac

Published on December 19, 2010 By Frogboy In Blogging

I'm not so much living in the Mac World but really visiting.

I'm a PC guy through and through. Not out of any particular love of the PC but because historically that's where the best tech was.

Sure, if you're a Mac user, you tend to get hung up on style over substance -- in my opinion. I was an OS/2 user from 1992 to 1999 and there's no way you'd ever convince me that System 7 through OS 9 was as good as OS/2 was.

From 2000 on, I've been a Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 user. Windows isn't elegant. But it definitely gets the job done and while I occasionally dabbled with each iteration of MacOS X, I found it quirky enough to put me off.

The one area that Apple really blows away the PC is with laptops. Apple has really nailed laptops in ways that Lenovo and the rest can only dream. I love my Thinkpad T400 but I've yet to have a laptop that is painless to bring out of sleep or to have it reconnect to wireless quickly or navigate around as easily as you think it should.

By contrast, my MacBook Pro (15 inch, 2.66 Core I7 with SSD, 8 GB) is a dream to use. Even its touchpad has won this Trackpoint zealot over. I'd still prefer a Trackpoint if I could get one but the touchpad on here is much nicer than anything I've used before, particularly because of the multi-touch.

In a nutshell, Microsoft needs to get off their duff. Windows 7 is a good recovery from Vista but it's still remarkably creeky in the connectivity area. Moreover, given how universally bad PC laptops are at basics like waking from sleep (something every version of Windows promises to fix) combined with how long they usually take to get back on a WiFi connection I am convinced that Windows has some fundamental sloppiness in that regard.

So would I switch to being a Mac user full time? Not a chance. There's just too much stuff available for Windows and when properly tuned, Windows 7 (with Object Desktop) is an absolute power user's dream. But I have to say, I am loving my Macbook Pro.

Comments

Dr Guy

on Dec 20, 2010

I used OS2 when it first came out (just to familiarize myself with it) and then about 7 years later (Warp 4) when I was doing an Email Migration from CC Mail to Groupwise (that was in the day when Novell hated Microsoft and so built their gateway around OS2 instead of NT). It was a great OS! But doomed to failure as Microsoft won that battle (and almost all the others it entered).

Like you, I am in the windows world (it pays the bills), but I do like OSX. And have been supporting it since the X came from Unix (not ten like Jobs and others want you to believe). You are correct in that as well - MacOS was not good (the GUI was great) until OSX. But then microsoft came out with XP, and it has been a horse race since. The best thing about OSX is the lack of a registry! Installing and deleting programs is a dream!

But when 99% of the Apps all run on windows (even safari), you kind of have to go where the apps are.

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