I tried to believe, without really being convinced, believing that I’d be convinced eventually. Here I am, a year later, and I’m not really convinced, and I’m not sure that I can just take it on faith anymore.
I think I came to the mac platform buying into some of the hype.. the stuff you hear all the time:
* Things ‘just work’
* The UI is better designed
* Nicer iLife Apps
* Unix-based
* It looks nicer
I think I’ve pretty much been disillusioned about every one of these things, except for maybe the last one. I’d like to examine each one in more detail
* *Things ‘just work’*: I’d say that some things ‘just work’. Usually the tradeoff you see is that the common case works well, but try to do anything a little different, and it stops ‘just working’. Put too many photos in iPhoto? it ‘just beachballs’. Try to run Aperture on a Powerbook G4? It’s ‘just slow’. Go to some websites that have lots of fun javascript? Safari ‘just swaps’. Try to input Japanese once in a while? It ‘just takes forever to respond to the first few keystrokes’. Try to do something fun in Finder? it just sometimes doesn’t work at all. Entourage? umm yeah.
* *The UI is better designed*: Some things are better, but the OSX UI has just as many quirks as Windows does. From dock weirdness, menubar weirdness, to ‘maximize button’ weirdness. How the current input language seems to switch randomly. Command-tab weirdness (how command-tab lets you switch between two apps back and forth, but command-tilde cycles through windows always in the same direction). If you have to go into NetInfo.. please.. the windows registry is easier to understand than NetInfo.
* *Nicer iLife Apps*: Not much here. iTunes runs on windows too. iCal is a pretty and slow version of an outlook calendar. OK, garage band is pretty good. Picasa is better than iPhoto.
* *Unix-based*: This sounds better than it is. It has annoyingly different BSD versions of things. It doesn’t support NIS well. Sure you can compile open source stuff for it, but running the X server isn’t always the greatest experience, darwin ports is.. well, “meh”, it’s not anywhere close to a real ubuntu + debian repository. I say nice try, but it’s not actually that useful to me. But I can still believe it’s a bigger deal for others.
Maybe people who read this will say I’m picking an unfair fight, or that windows doesn’t do a lot of these things well either. But that’s not the point.. the point is I paid a premium for this, and I’m not sure I got something that was that much better. If anything, most of the value is from not having to worry too much about putting the hardware together. When I bought the Powerbook, it was the only laptop that had all the features that I wanted in one package.
I’m kinda starting to think that maybe for a non-saavy consumer, or a not-necessarily-technical enthusiast, the mac may truly be a better platform. But for the power user, or someone who knows how to make any platform work reasonably well, it’s just not a clear winner, and its questionable whether it really justifies the extra cost.