I wrote this for a friend thinking about switching to Mac.
I don’t want to screw him. Although… I think I may have left out some things.
rds
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On Switching…
My thoughts on this topic, being a longtime Mac user and wanting to convince the pre-converted to switch, are rather deep, but I know busy people don’t have lots of time to read, so I’ll keep it as short as possible.
Quality of Life Enhancement
The primary reason I use a Mac is that I feel better about myself, as a person, when I’m using a Mac. When you read this, keep in mind that I’ve been a Mac user for twenty years, but have spent most of my professional life (last ten years) working with a variety of UNIX and Windows systems on a daily basis.
This is a rather non-technical reason, but is the truth. I suspect this may be true for many Mac users, whether they are consciously aware of it or not.
Consciously “knowing” this thing, that using Macs lead to increased quality of life for most people, for any given person, depends on that person being well-versed in one or more non-Mac computer types, and being able to compare the experience of using those computers versus using a Mac. Or maybe not.
Under the covers, there are a number of technological reasons that using a Mac makes me feel better about myself, and as a “power user”, I am aware of most of them in detail. I’ll point out a few of them throughout this.
This quality of life aspect of the Mac didn’t happen by accident — it was integral to the design and concept of the first Macintosh. Jobs’s goal was to remove the user awareness of interfacing with a computer from the end application “user experience”, and make computers more closely resemble whatever application the user really needed to get work done. Writing, drawing, creating.
The first Macs were revolutionary, then Jobs got kicked out of Apple.
In the void of years during his absence from Apple, the company lost sight of the original mission, and the rest of the computing/OS industry stole enough concept from Apple (due to market demand) that Windows and other operating systems acquired many of the quality of life enhancements that Apple originally innovated and put into their OS. Just not all of them.
The reality is that a number of problems arose, due to market dominance, that Apple has not had to deal with. See “Myths” below.
Had Apple followed the same path, they would have had to deal with them too.
With Jobs back at Apple, the focus is back on making computers/user experiences that are transparent, revealing the Application as the primary function of the computer.
And making money, and dominating the portable music market, and some other shit.
Cult of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is one of the most talented public speakers in the world. I’d say top ten, right in there with the Dalai Lama.
He also has the ability to focus on his vision of “reality”, known as the Jobs Reality Distortion Field, to a degree that an outside observer may describe as “psychotic”.
My only observation regarding Jobs is my perception that 99% of his job enjoyment comes from doing product presentations in front of adoring audiences. I associate with this joy. There is nothing better than manipulating a crowd to your will. Rock stars will attest to this.
These presentations generally go off without a hitch, and are models of showmanship to be studied and emulated. See “Jimi Hendrix”.
The point is that you can generally believe _nothing_ Jobs says during these presentations, at face value. This will manifest itself via my discussion of “Spotlight” in a bit.
All first-generation Apple products have major problems, as is the nature of technology. Trust in this.
Cost
Apple is currently on a tear, with the Mac mini, of attempting to prove that Macs cost the same or less than comparable PCs.
This is not true. Macs are more expensive, period.
But you are paying for a quality of life enhancement value-add. Remember this.
Why are Apples more expensive? Because Dell. HP and Gateway are cheaper.
This may seem like pretzel logic, but those companies represent 98% of the market. They can afford to be cheaper.
Where does the quality of life increase come from?
This could get long, but I’ll force it short.
There are three areas that drive the Mac QOL experience:
a) Component Integration
b) iLife
c) Relative Serenity of OS
Again, brief:
A) Component Integration
Any Mac you buy, like any computer, is built of pieces that, by and large, Apple didn’t manufacture.
The computer is assembled by another company overseas, just like with most other manufacturers today. Except Dell, which makes their computers in Texas and other places in the US. I won’t get into supply-side economics here.
With Apple. the difference is that you are getting a set of components sold as a specific Mac model, and those components (CPU, busses, video card, etc) are going to work together seamlessly. Without shit jumping out at you after you boot.
Does Apple support 3rd party devices? Sure. And you need to get drivers for most of them. Apple didn’t write those drivers. Caveat emptor.
However, what you buy out of the box is going to work when you turn it on. I can personally guarantee that, unless you got a bad box.
This may seem like not so big a deal, unless you’ve had experiences otherwise with other platforms.
b) iLife
iLife is Apple’s suite of QoL-enhancing home apps. The newest version should come with your Mac.
Apple comes out with a new major release of iLife about once every year-18 months, and you get to pay for it. Lucky you.
The iApps do the same things, more or less, as comparable Windows programs. There are two main differences:
b.1) They are elegant, sharing (as much as possible) a common look and feel.
b.2) They talk to each other.
The iApps are:
a) iTunes: rip your CDs, catalog them, listen to them, burn more CDs, buy music from the iTunes Music store, download podcasts and audiobooks from one interface, copy music to your iPod or other digital music player
Isn’t iTunes available on Windows? Yup. It’s the only iApp that is currently, and the Mac version works more or less like the Windows version.
b) iPhoto: copy your photos from your digital camera, catalog them, view them, make slideshows, burn them to CDs and DVDs for sending to family and friends, publish them to a .Mac web page
iPhoto is for photos what iTunes is for music.
As of the current version, it’s fast and usable, which couldn’t be said before.
c) iMovie: copy digital video from your camera or other sources, make movies with cool transitions and stuff, burn them to DVD via iDVD, sports and shit, or make Quicktime files to e-mail to your friends.
iMovie is actually the oldest iApp, pre-dating Apple’s acquisition of the code that became iTunes.
This was due to Job’s mis-calculation in 2000 that digital video was going to surpass digital audio as the next Killer App. By 2001, Jobs had figured it out, and we had iPod, and stable iTunes.
When I lived in Minneapolis, during my free-fall, I started to inload ALL CDs into iTunes. Because I realized that the concept of “any song any time” was a QoL-enhancer.
There will not be a video iPod any time soon, per my estimation. Too expensive, not enough market, DRM issues, other bullshit.
d) iDVD: interfaces with other iApps to make DVDs with titles, menus and stuff. Drag-and-drop.
Probably the hardest-to-use iApp at the moment, but gets better with every release.
iDVD is the primary reason you’d consider getting a Superdrive in your Mac.
e) Garageband: create music just like Dennis Chatagnier.
The newest iApp, but it’s a wow-er.
Comes with many pre-defined loops and sampled/synthed digital instruments.
You can be as big a moron as I am, and still make music that’s in the correct key / lines up on the measures. Also a decent podcast-creation tool.
There are also the spattering of other QoL tools that just come with the core OS, like:
Mail: your e-mail app. I have converted from Entourage (MS version of Outlook for OS X) and am not looking back. I believe Sylvester has done the same. Entourage is very weak and bloated.
Other crap. Sports and shit.
c) Relative serenity of OS
Your Mac OS X that comes installed on the machine (which you probably want to erase ASAP and re-load from a fresh disc) does NOT come pre-loaded with tons of crap.
It is:
The base OS
The iApps (I think… Apple _should_ be bundling the current iLife with all new Macs. If they’re not, they’re fools. IApps differentiate the Mac.)
The base OS tools (mail, etc)
Hooks into Apple Support, .Mac, etc.
That’s it.
To state things bluntly, there are not GD windows jumping up in your face every 20 seconds screaming at you that this and that is happening, asking if you want to demo some piece of spyware, and telling you what just got put on the dock.
The OS, by and large, stays out of your way, once you learn how to use it.
ONCE YOU LEARN HOW TO USE IT.
Every once in a while, the Mac will remind you to install updates, but you can tell it to go away.
You can have it check daily, weekly or monthly, but you can also tell it just to shut the heck up until you’re ready.
I could rant further about how the fact the core OS is UNIX leads to a QoL enhancement, but that’s more of a power user thing.
With that said, as an amateur developer, the fact that I have all Mac tools, in addition to all UNIX/GNU (sh, gcc, perl, python, awk/sed, vi, the beat goes on) tools available to me both on my laptop and home system is… powerful.
Ex. Whenever I upload a podcast, I could do it all by hand, a process that would take about an hour per show. In about two hours, using my UNIX skills, I wrote some basic perl/sh/awk scripts that do it for me, in about five minutes.
QoL.
Can I use my Mac without broadband internet?
No.
No computer, in 2005, should be used without broadband internet. Period. I’m being dogmatic about this.
I don’t care that your Mac, and every Mac, has a modem. Forget it exists, unless your broadband is down and you’re in a pinch. To send e-mail. That’s it.
Apple is just as dependent on the web for things like app/OS updates as Windows.
The updates, as with Windows, are huge, generally 5MB-10MB for app updates, and 20-40MB for OS / large app upgrades.
Is there negative QoL associated with being a Mac user?
Yeah, there are. Namely, that you’re not running a Microsoft operating system.
Do not underestimate how much of a drag that can be. I’ll tell you the cases where it really has bugged me, and lead to negative QoL:
a) Developing Audits for My Former Company.
I’m running a system with many benefits and hooks that make the on-the-fly development process for the Audits much more straightforward. Of course, my colleagues aren’t.
b) No Visio. As an engineer, that did suck from time to time.
c) The occasional case of saving a file that someone else couldn’t read.
This usually had to do with a) the fact that Mac uses Quicktime as the media engine for everything and b) about 40% of Windows users are running Quicktime.
d) Microsoft Office apps being sub-standard on OS X. I’ll pause here for a second…
Word, Excel and PowerPoint are completely serviceable, albeit slow compared to their Windows versions.
Go figure… without the ability to hook into Windows libraries, it’s understandable why they suck.
By and large, Office X saves files that are completely useable on the Windows MS Office suite, albeit with the odd formatting change that, as far as I can tell, usually has to do with font differences between the systems.
For term papers and whatnot, the user could always save the file as a PDF, which is a native service in OS X. No add-on software from Adobe, no hacks to download.
As a side-note, the reason this is so easy is that every image rendered on a screen in OS X is a PDF: Display PDF, to be precise. Apple originally wanted to do Display Postscript, as Jobs did at NeXT, but Adobe’s licensing fees were insane. Fortunately, the PDF specification is in the public domain. Hence…
Office is about $500 retail.
Now, Entourage, the OS X version of Outlook, is another story. In short, it sucks.
They added Exchange support about a version or so ago, but it’s weak. Sylvester tried to get it to work rationally for over a year, and finally abandoned it in favor of OS X Mail. If I understand correctly, it doesn’t do calendar integration at all.
For home use, that’s probably not much of a big deal. Just know it.
e) It’s… not a MS OS.
The downside here is… if you need to run a MS app, you’re hurting.
If it’s something you run infrequently, without a need for performance, VirtualPC is conceivably viable. Everybody hurts, sometimes.
Otherwise… well.
Dispelling False Myths about Mac
1. Macs are virus and spyware-proof.
This is not true. There is nothing built into OS X offering native “immunity” to any sort of malicious code.
If Macs were natively immune, there wouldn’t be anti-virus programs for the Mac (there are, and you will get one, install it, and run it periodically unless you want to catch viruses).
The _only_ reason Macs are _less_ prone to viruses and spyware is the simple fact that Macs represent 2-3% of the PC market. They are less of a target for that reason _alone_.
It could be argued that UNIX has a something to do with it, but I’ll leave that discussion out.
2. PC Emulation (ex. Microsoft VirtualPC) is an acceptable avenue for running Wintel programs on a Mac
In reality, no. It’s purely a matter of speed, not capability.
Do NOT expect to run VirtualPC every day on your new Mac and get away with it. You will be disappointed.
If you have a G5-based Mac, you can consider VirtualPC for non-realtime programs such as Visio.
However, programs that were taxing your PC (ex. games, other graphics- and numbers-intensive systems) in the first place will not perform to your liking (or at all) under VirtualPC.
I think Sylvester may back me up on this. Ask him about MoodLogic.
3. Macs don’t crash.
Obviously, this is complete horse shit. All computers in 2005 crash. We have not defeated (or more realistially… met) Alan Turing yet.
Macs do crash/hang/panic/just go out to lunch from time to time, like any computer.
Sadly, it seems mine has been doing this a bit more under 10.4 “Tiger”, but what can I say… it’s a new OS release.
And I have a _lot_ extra crap loaded on my system, including some kernel extensions. Sports and shit.
Not surprisingly, the odds of them doing this. situationally, map somewhat closely to Windows machines doing the same thing, and are functions of:
a) how much dangerous 3rd party crap you have loaded on the computer
b) how many apps you have open vs. the amount of RAM on the system
c) how hard you’re pushing the CPU / memory / threads / kernel at any given moment
I could make the assertion that Macs crash _less_, given the smaller target area for viruses and stuff like that, but I can’t quantify it.
I’ll say only that you Mac should crash less than your Windows machine, and perhaps more frequently than an average HP-UX commercial system.
4. Heavy duty network performance is poor
Take two Macs, hook them together on Gigabit ethernet, and have them do some Appletalk-based file sharing.
The performance is crap.
Take a Mac, put them on a network, have the Mac act as a CIFS client to a Windows file server.
The performance is, amazingly, better. I’m at a loss.
At the level of network activity associated with things like web browsing/software download, this isn’t much of an issue. However, know that it’s something Sylvester, Jason and I have all run into.
5. Macs interoperate with everything.
Total horse shit.
They interoperate _very well_ with anything with an Apple logo on it.
They interoperate pretty well with anything with a little smiling “OS X” logo on the box, like 90% of the Firewire and USB 2 hard drives on the market.
They do NOT interoperate well with:
My Blueberry (without an add-on conduit)
My Motorola RAZR V3 cell phone (iSync works fine for contacts, not so well for the “browser”, which is the way I get digital pictures off and whatnot)
5. Apple has all the hard-core technology innovations, ex. Spotlight, signaling their dominance, technology-wise, over Microsoft
Uh yeah, about that.
Apple has, no doubt, _many_ good technologies at work in their products. As does anyone who can afford to put ads on TV.
Spotlight (high-speed content-based searching) will, one day, be one of those technologies.
Right now, Spotlight is an example of what happens when Apple, like any technology company, pushes a new technology out the door before it’s finished or ready.
Admittedly, I’m searching about 1TB of data when I open Spotlight, and if I wait long enough it _does_ return some amazing hits, but… Spotlight is weak.
Apple is not perfect. Please remember this. Over time, I’ve moved from being a Mac zealot to more of a Mac pundit. It took 20 years.
20 years. I hope to live another 20 years. Nate Fisher didn’t.
I love my Macs, and they increase my quality of life, just like my cats do, but I also have to deal with a lot of crap when using them.
I also have to deal with a lot of cat shit.
The net effect, however, is positive. For both Mac-user, and cat-cohabitator.
The Future of Apple
I can’t sit here with a straight face and say that buying a PowerPC-based Mac, in August of 2005, is a good “investment”.
If you buy a Mac now, it’s a product created in the “lame duck” period before Apple switches to Intel, which is the stated direction from Jobs as of June/July 2005. We have to assume this switch _will_ happen, because Jobs has put his d**k out over it.
Of course, _no_ computer of any sort is a good “investment”. There is little market for exotic antique computers. Computers are, by their nature, obsolete before you open the box.
With that said, for someone spending $1500-$2000 right now for a device expected to have a 2-4 year useful lifespan isn’t something I would consider “throwing your money away”. You will get a reasonable return, in QoL.
Do _not_ buy a high-end Mac for your home now (ex. costing $4000-$6000), unless you expect to get a return via business.
You’d expect a longer useful product life, and once Apple really starts moving to Intel as the dominant platform, we will start to see loss of programs/feature-functions in the PowerPC hardware base.
I predict there is a 10% probability that the loss of revenue/customer base Apple sustains during the Intel move will cause irreparable damage to the company, resulting in loss of business viability. But again, I don’t think even if that happened that it would impact a 2-4 year purchase.
I predict there is a 100% probability that if you and your family enjoy the iMac you buy now, that you will buy an Intel-based Mac at the appropriate time.
Do Buy
If you go the Mac route, consider the following strong buy recommendations:
a) a G5 iMac over a Mac mini (underpowered piece of shit for those seeking PURE POWER)
Also, the 20″ monitor is nice.
b) 802.11g home networking (aka Airport Extreme/Airport Express)
c) Bluetooth mouse / keyboard / adapter
The “wow” factor of these items is hard to beat, even though they’re expensive.
KNOW, however, that if you home is already a lair for radio signals (wireless phones, cell phones, sports and shit, wireless networking, other wireless keyboards, all the same crap coming from your neighbor’s house), that, well, this is another set that will, from time to time, stomp all over the other ones.
About once a day, my keyboard goes out to lunch for ten seconds, and the last key I was pressing just repeatssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss across the screen.
It’s a pisser, but wireless is the way to go whenever possible. Wires are www.suchbullshit.com.
d) An external Firewire hard drive to back up your data.
Just do this.
Do NOT buy any product from LaCie, no matter how cool they look. Every LaCie drive I’ve had has died an early death.
For .Mac subscribers, there is a free Backup tool called, amazingly, “Backup”. It’s not necessarily feature-rich, but it’s easy to use, set up, and forget about. For home use, it’s enough to back up settings, documents folders, music libraries, photo libraries, etc.
Backup requires a .Mac account. More on .Mac in a second.
e) Most things made by Griffin Technologies.
They are a very Mac-centric peripherals company, making a lot of stuff that Apple should make, but doesn’t for one reason or another.
Remote controls, knobs, spinny things, flashing lights.
Consider Buying
a) A .Mac Account
At $100 a year, it’s… well… I can’t say it’s a great deal, for what you get:
a) some marginal amount of web space with nice templates for building pages
b) some e-mail addresses (5, I think, by default)
c) Access to some free tools (Backup, etc)
d) ability to replicate preferences, Safari favorites, etc between Macs
The main thing it has going for it is the ability, in iPhoto to:
a) select some pictures
b) click one button, “Post to .Mac” or something
c) you answer some questions
d) they upload
e) you get a link you can send to friends and family for them to look at the pictures
I have to admit that’s pretty neat, although expensive.
Admittedly, there are hacks available (or there were, anyway) that allow you to do this sort of thing with _any_ web space/folder/directory.
.Mac is not, by any means, a necessity.
Do NOT Buy
a) Any hard drives made by LaCie
Other things to know
A) For home use, you _will_ want to set up multiple users.
With 10.4, I believe there are new parental controls determining who can run/get access to what.
Also, 10.4 added ACL-based permissions, in addition to the standard UNIX file permissions model, making it much easier to control who gets access to what.
Kessler undoubtedly has more practical experience here, as I think he and his kids all use their Mac.
B) Apple charges for OS updates.
New OSes have been coming out every 18-24 months, are they’re generally $100-$120 dollars.
C) Bummer: OS X has no built-in iApp for web page development.
There’s the crap you can do via templates on .Mac, but no built-in web development system. You’d be looking at Dreamweaver, which I can give you, along with all the Adobe stuff and a lot of other apps.
