I recently bought myself a MacBook and have now also started to do all my work on Mac OS X.
It has to be said that I used to be quite the Bill Gates evangelist up until a couple of months ago when I got a new PC laptop with Vista installed. I don’t have much more to say other than it crashed and burned a couple of weeks ago. It might have been a virus, it might have been Vista being tired of my almost reckless use of the OS. Seriously, you can’t find a damn thing on there for all the pop-up warnings. It was clear that it was time for something reliable and where I felt like I was in control, but not too much.
I thought I’d become of age and stop my near neurotic obsession with a computer that I can feel and screw up as much as I want to, and buy myself an Apple computer. There has been a major change in how I work with computers, between when I was 14 years old and now 10 years later – my focus has changed a lot. As a young and inexperienced boy, I used to spend hours upon hours trying to figure out what to do next – I had already cleaned my desktop five times! So I began to go deeper and found out that a PC can take you as far as a black hole. It’s endless (are black holes endless?). And that’s probably a good thing for some people…
But I use a computer at least 14 hours a day now and need to just focus on my work. Here’s a small list of must-haves for that situation:
* I need to be able to rely on my computer. I don’t want an “UNEXPECTED ERROR!!!” or such useless nonsense.
* I need to be able to focus on my work and not on a cluttered visual mess.
* I need to not be distracted by idiotic pop-ups warning me of things that I learnt as a child. Small useful notifications will do, but silently taking the intelligent choice is preferred.
* I need to quickly test across various platforms and browsers, while coding XHTML/CSS.
It’s clear that with the new Intel Macs, I can cross the latter off the list. Running Parallels is a dream. I can even access my netbanking through IE6 (the most reliable way to use Danske Bank’s services) in a small window, while still Exposé-ing and drag’n'dropping.
I think I’ll make another list. Here’s the reasons why Mac just works better than PC (i.e. Vista).
* You feel in control of what’s happening. You’re accepting the “vital” changes, but acknowledge that most processes and settings are hidden, because you won’t actually need to change them. Someone has already figured out that this is the way a person wants to work and want to save you time.
* There’s an application for everything that I had on my PC. I have yet to find a Windows-only program that I need, where I haven’t found a great Mac alternative (well except for a dodgy, broken web browser, but who needs that anyway!)
* No constant re-booting. I haven’t re-booted in two days. The energy saving settings are amazing.
* There are so many small, helpful workflow features such as Exposé and Spaces. I can organize my processes and not worry about them being back to square one the next time there’s an OS update. I use four spaces: 1 = Web/Mail (Firefox, Thunderbird) – 2 = Instant messaging (Campfire, Skype, Adium) – 3 = Development (Photoshop, Textmate, Versions, etc.) – 4 = Entertainment (iTunes).
I like Mac now, but I have no regrets about not switching earlier. I have used older versions of Mac OS before and they’ve never impressed the way that Mac OS X has. This is not an advertisement for Apple – it’s an ode to better usability, natural logic and swallowing your pride to make a change sometime. Less is more.
