Oh no! It’s another Mac vs. Windows comparison! Run and hide!
I bought a Mac last year because quite a few of my customers were sending Mac-formatted files. Until then, I had two options for dealing with them:
1) Ask them to turn them into PDFs and resend them.
2) Sneak over to the church office after hours to convert them to PDF myself.
It helped that I lived next door to the church, but still, option 2 wasn’t a long-term viable solution, and the whole point of my service is to make it easier for missionaries to send their files, so whenever I can avoid asking them to do any extra work, I do.
At the same time, my then-five-year-old Dell laptop was in serious need of going into retirement, so I was also in the market for a laptop to serve as my non-work and on-the-road computer.
So, I bought an iBook. It’s the 12”-screen model, is tremendously portable, and quickly got named Snowball. (I name all of my computers after either cold things with spillover into natural disasters. It was going to be cold things or weather patterns, but I couldn’t start liking the idea of calling a server “gentlerain.deefs.net”. Avalanche sounded so much better.) It predates the Mac-Intel combination, intentionally, since I wanted to be able to support legacy programs.
I wasn’t sure if a Mac would be able to keep me happy with my personal computing needs, but I was confident enough to give it a go — most of my non-work computer usage consists of Firefox (cross-platform), Thunderbird (cross-platform), Photoshop (cross-platform), and accessing other computers using SSH (which is so cross-platform that my phone can do it). Add the occasional game to the mix and some sort of PDF viewer, and there’s not much else that I use.
Apparently, the experiment worked out, because I just bought another one. A MacBook Pro this time, and on the day of release, no less. I must really look like a Mac addict. Ha!
There were a few things that didn’t work out, so I’ll list those first:
Microsoft Money. I’ve been using Microsoft Money for a long time. In fact, my current Money file has been around longer than I’ve known my wife. Outside of Windows itself, there’s no program that I’ve used continuously for a longer period of time (I switched from WordPerfect to Word when I went to Dartmouth, otherwise it would’ve won even over Windows). It’s not remotely Mac-compatible, so it’s on my work computer.
GAIM (now Pidgin). There isn’t/wasn’t a native Mac version of GAIM available. I didn’t like iChat, and none of the other alternatives I tried were all that impressive to me. I think I settled on iChat by default, but drifted away from IM pretty quickly.
Games. Lots of Yahoo’s games don’t work on the Mac. That was disappointing. Fortunately, Text Twist does. In addition, Neverwinter Nights was a no-go (not that I think the iBook’s specs would have met the requirements). Warcraft and Starcraft both work, which is nice. I did buy a copy of Bejeweled 2 for a low-brain-commitment game while traveling, and that helped.
The display. After just a year (or, more precisely, just over a year), I have a number of pixels that aren’t working right. I’m not impressed by that, which was never a problem with the Dell.
Preview. The font rendering is illegible most of the time, unless you’re zoomed in. Acrobat on Windows is much better, especially with small fonts. Presumably Acrobat can be set up in place of Preview. I haven’t checked yet.
I also had a few other gripes listed here, but they’re business-related, and this is more about the personal side of things, so I removed them.
On the positive side, there’s the following:
Cost. At Dell, the computer I spec’ed out as a not-especially-extravagant laptop for personal use cost between $1800 and $2100. The cheaper stuff was either not powerful enough to run the software I’d be running on it at a decent speed, or the parts were flimsy and/or meant for desktops. The Mac that met my specs was $1299, minus whatever rebate Amazon was running at the time, plus a little extra to upgrade the RAM myself.
The “it just works” factor. Especially when compared to Windows and Linux, this is truly impressive. Wireless networks just work. Networked printers show up automatically, usually without needing to find and install drivers. Apache, with PHP? Sure, just check this box to turn it on.
Dashboard. I like having a bunch of frequently-accessed tools just a keystroke away.
Spotlight. Load any program or file with Apple-Space, first two letters of the program or file, maybe an arrow key or two, and Enter.
Less lockout. I don’t know about “no lockout,” but I don’t have to authenticate my operating system every time the computer boots up, there’s no 30+ character license key to enter when you reinstall the OS, and I can get updates without having to install validation software. It’s nice when the OS doesn’t (at least visibly) assume that you’re out to get it.
It’s pretty. Windows Vista makes up some ground in this respect, but the Mac is still more aesthetically pleasing, in my opinion. I’m utilitarian enough that I don’t care much about this aspect, but it’s a nice bonus.
The kicker, though, and the reason I just bought a new MacBook Pro, is the powered-by-Unix aspect. The iBook gives me access to just about everything I like about Linux, and adds a really nice UI, without the need to spend hours upon hours downloading and compiling KDE, replacing it every few months when there’s a new release, and trying to work out compatibility issues.
Having a Unix variant on hand was particularly useful back in April, when I found out that I wasn’t going to have Internet access at a conference that began the next day. I was able to get a full working copy of my software going that night, which really saved the weekend in terms of marketing.
That also lets me put my development server right on the laptop if I want, so I can write and test code wherever, without needing to connect to an outside server.
When combined with an Intel chip and Parallels (if it runs as advertised), that means I’ll be able to take just one computer out to a big conference in Colorado this summer, and use it to do all of my work as well as run a demo server at my booth. Otherwise, I’d need two or three.
I went with a MacBook Pro to get the bigger screen, more RAM and disk space for the PostgreSQL database (9GB address validation database, for instance), and more processing power for running Windows simultaneously with the Mac, the database, and Apache.
My main work computer is going to remain on Windows, for a few reasons:
Most of my incoming work requires Windows.
Printing is much easier on Windows.
I have no idea what the algorithm is behind the green plus button on the Mac (please fill me in if you know), but it certainly isn’t as useful as Maximize is on Windows.
Windows seems to be better at multi-display than Mac. There’s certainly a much broader variety of video cards, and Windows makes it very easy to do a three-monitor spread, which I prefer by far to one large screen (never mind the fact that my three LCDs combined cost less than a single cinema display). It’s simple to assign programs to a specific monitor.
Mac desktops strike me as being overpriced. The exceptions would be the non-expandable iMac and Mac mini, which don’t support my three-monitor setup and are therefore not in the running. Going from three monitors to one monitor would be like trading in your Hummer for a Mini-Cooper. Cramped. And you don’t even get the improved mileage in this case.
I’m very curious to see how Parallels is going to affect the playing field. I haven’t installed it yet (I need to do a Windows license shuffle first), though it’ll be happening soon. If I can negate some of my Mac frustrations and get some of the Windows benefits, it might be worth doing. We’ll see!
