Sigh. I hate computers.
I’m not unhappy with the mac, but I’m starting to see it’s deficiencies again. For one thing, the monitor-redetect-on-resume thing still hasn’t been fixed. It’s been, well, 3 months, and I’m still seeing it. Maybe there just aren’t that many people using this monitor.. it is targeted at niche, afterall.. but still you’d think Apple would care about that niche (photogs).
But what does Apple care about? I don’t think they’re really the company that cared about high end computers and niche markets. They are now the company of iPhones and iPads. Sure they still care about the Mac, but they’re not going to win the desktop. They know that. By the time they could even “win,” there will be no desktop left to win. Everyone’s moving to the web, for better or for worse. And when everyone’s there, what client OS you run won’t matter as much, as long as you have a decent browser. Already, I often feel as if this mini is just some kind of glorified web terminal. Besides, if I were Apple, I’d be thinking about how to dominate the phone and tablet markets than worrying as much about the Mac. The fanboys will still come. The halo effect is still there.
I’ve also started to think about working from home more. For that I’d invest in a pair of large monitors for the productivity. The mini limits my options here. I can’t do two Dell U2711’s because there’s only one dual-link capable port on this thing. And I’m still not going to pay an extra 2k or whatever to get the Mac Pro that can do it. On my 3 year old PC, I can just buy a new $100 video card to enable that. I’m also out of USB ports. Yea on a PC, maybe just get a USB add in card, or do your worst and get a new motherboard. Even with a Mac Pro, good luck finding a card that works.
The mini isn’t too slow, but it isn’t really that fast either. I knew going into this that it wasn’t going to be a huge improvement, but maybe it’s just OS X that slows down once you start to keep a lot of apps open. Chrome still feels way faster on windows. It doesn’t help that my PC had more RAM and a raptor. Vista on the PC felt faster than this Mac. There must be something architectural, because there’s not enough difference in the horsepower to explain this. It’s that whole weird thing where it feels like they’re limiting the desktop to 30fps.
This whole flash acceleration thing is lame too. People give MS a lot of flack, but they are the only one to have the right video decode acceleration API. It’s sad that if I ran bootcamp on my mac and then connected to Hulu, I would get a better experience than just using the Mac Flash. Sure sure, html5, whatever.
What I’m kinda afraid of is that while I can say I’m one of those people who’s been using Linux for like 10 years now (actually, since 1998), I still grew up on Windows, and there’s still something that feels very natural about it. Maybe I will never be able to escape that, and I should stop trying. And if I ever do manage to escape it, it shouldn’t be for a platform where I’m just ceding complete control to someone else, who might equally not care about the things that matter to me.