I’ve used each of the Apple machines pretty much when they came out. I’ve owned several, most recently a Powerbook. Yet the Mac has never stuck with me. Now, my black MacBook is bringing me joy. I use my big honking Windows desktop machine only when I have to.

What happened?

I’ve had what I think of as legitimate reasons to find the Mac unpleasant. I don’t think of Apple as a user-friendly company. The Mac’s insistence on sticking with interface idiocies like shipping with a one-button mouse and only allowing drag-sizing from the bottom right-hand corner, strike me as explicable only as arrogance. I prefer Microsoft’s willingness to run Windows on machines manufactured in an open market, although it does result in the chaos of drivers that is the bane of Windows’ existence. The lack of software for the Mac is an issue. And then there are my idiosyncratic reasons for sticking with Windows, including the tons of utilities programs I’ve written for myself and my need to run a version of Powerpoint that has full path animation, which Mac Powerpoint lacks.

Likewise, I’ve been unpersuaded by the Mac’s case against Windows. Windows XP (Microsoft’s failed to give me to a good reason to switch to Vista) is quite robust and stable. Even when a program crashes, it doesn’t pull down the entire operating system. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t get viruses. The registry is an overly-complex solution to the complexity of modern software, but it rarely gets in your way, and being able to edit it (after making a back up, of course) actually gives you some additional control over your machine. The problems Mac users rag on Windows users about generally don’t hold against sufficiently sophisticated users. I have become a sufficiently sophisticated at Windows use. I’ve had to.

So, what’s changed my mind?

Some of it has nothing to do with the Mac. In particular, I’m coming off of a Thinkpad X40, an admirably light and small laptop, which has me enjoying the MB’s larger and wider screen. That’s helping a lot.

The open source movement has now created great software in enough categories that I don’t feel like I’m downgrading. Open Office (I’m using the NeoOffice flavor of it, which uses more of the Mac’s UI and skips X11, or at least makes it invisible) now feels as good as Word; the upgrade to the spell checker, for example, has helped. Thunderbird and Firefox work just fine on the MB. The utility programs, like the text editors and FTP programs, are great, and even tend to be prettier than their Windows’ counterparts. So, even though there is far less software available for the Mac, for me there’s enough, and enough is all I need. And, the same is true for the non-open source stuff. The one category that matters to me that the Mac loses at is games. But I still have my honking Windows desktop for that.

The ability to run Windows on the same MB is comforting, especially during the transition. I have a 10gb partition for Windows, leaving about 140gb for Mac. I find I’m only using the Windows partition for working in Powerpoint and for retrieving items I forgot to port over. And, Parallels, which lets you run Windows in a window on your Mac desktop, may not be rock solid, but it is way cool.

I do like knowing Unix is under the hood. It enables a range of tinkering that would require far deeper knowledge in Windows. (Windows API anyone?) Of course, tinkering is how people like me get in trouble.

OS X absolutely handles some core user functions better than Windows does. When I close the lid on my Thinkpad, I can never be entirely sure what state I’m going to find the machine in when I come back. It’s supposed to go into sleep mode, but it on occasion goes into either hibernation or total shutdown. And it takes way too long to come back, no matter what state it’s in. This is one of those things you’d think Microsoft and hardware manufacturers would have figured out by now. On the other hand, I can close my MB and be confident that when I open it, it’s going to blink its eyes once or twice and be fully awake. Likewise, my MB latches on to the strongest, open-est wifi signal without asking me to salute and sign some papers. Also, the Mac seems to be doing a better job of power management, although I’m not competent to judge this. (Hint: Turn on Parallels and watch your power drain, presumably as the Core 2 cpu #2 kicks in.)

Put it all together, and the MacBook feels great. It’s solid, it’s fast, the display is beautiful. Oh, I’ve had program crashes, and there’s UI stuff that seems thick-headed (how about letting me use just one finger to delete forward? Jeez!), but, well, it’s just a computer. And I’m enjoying it more than any computer since my original KayPro II.

Of course, it helped that I got it just before going on a working vacation when I could devote some serious relationship-bonding time with it. Employers ought to grant leaves of absence to users making the switch. The first couple of weeks are such an important bonding time. We ought to respect that. I hear the French give 14 days of paid leave.

Categories: misc dw