In the name of due diligence, after bagging on the Mac for all the ways it let me down, I should also consider this reverse question: what aspects of the Mac and OSX did I find unexpectedly useful or valuable.
* *Printing*: The whole printing subsystem works surprisingly well under OSX. The dialogs are simple, and I’ve never failed to print in a year’s use. Even printing wirelessly to the Airport Express’ usb port works just fine. I never imagined I would care, but they did it well enough for me to notice.
* *Disk Utility*: One of those fantastic system applications that I wish every other platform had. Although it doesn’t do that much, it does just enough to be useful in many situations. On top of this, the whole first-class support for the concept of disk images comes in very handy.
* *Shareware*: There’s a lot of software written by small companies or single authors fot the mac, and a significantly large percentage of it is really good. The GUI’s look nice, and in general they work very well. Certainly not like Windows where there’s tons and tons of choices to wade through, or Linux, where there will be 20 competing implementations of the same thing which all are incomplete in some way.
* *Freeware System Extensions*: Menu meters, quicksilver, growl. These additions work really well, integrate very well, and have surprising adoption rates among other apps (it’s amazing to see so many apps support growl). I feel like some of these things only appeal to real systems geeks who also care about the appearance of their UI (like myself), but even then there are numerous choices on the Mac for these kinds of things.
* *Bluetooth*: Like printing, the bluetooth experience has been pretty solid. I’ve used bluetooth keyboards and bluetooth to hook up to my cell phone as a modem, and both worked really well. Much better than anything I’ve ever tried on windows.
* *Wi-Fi, Airport Express*: Both of these ‘features’ are supported under Windows as well, but the experience is much better on the Mac. Again, I never really thought it could make such a difference, but now I dread going back to setup wireless networks on windows machines. The whole Location manager idea is really useful too. IBM tries to do this with their own software on Windows, but it’s just super confusing.
* *Firewire 800*: Another one of those, “I thought I would never really care” features, but it turns out it’s come in handy for my external drive. No PCMCIA or other dongles required.
* *Integration*: Before I used a Mac, I thought ‘integration’ just meant things like “my mail program knows about my address book.” I didn’t realize it could mean things like: “pause itunes when I get an incoming ichat conference request.” Now that’s integration.
* *VNC*: Having a built-in VNC server is super useful. But I won’t give this one full credit, because the Apple VNC server does some funny stuff that crashes a lot of standard VNC clients. Also the VNC client experience on OSX sucks ass.
* *(Legacy Support)*: Since I only still have one relatively new mac, so I can’t say I’ve really run into this, but everyone always talks about how the useful life of a mac is much longer than a PC. My officemate still manages to use is 6 year old Ti-Mac. It’s very nice to know that the hardware you just paid for won’t just be forgotten and unsupported in a few years (My girlfriend’s 3 year old Thinkpad hasn’t seen a driver update in ages).
I’m sure there are more. I’m sure I just can’t remember them. And I’m pretty sure that’s why the Windows grass is looking a little greener that it should at the moment.