

The Mac Won Me Over - matthewphiong
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/08/the-mac-won-me-over.html

======
Ixiaus
While the refinements of OS X and the Apple Mac hardware have been big sellers
for me, it was ultimately, the combination of a beautiful and intuitive GUI
coupled with an underlying Unix system. I know Windows has got Cygwin, it just
"isn't the same" though.

My story began with a $200.00 laptop and GNU/Linux. I spent four days
installing and configuring GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) on that poor laptop; I should
have been more diligent about checking up on hardware compatibility... The
roaches were X.org and the f'ing wireless card. This laptop was $200.00 for a
reason. It turns out many of the parts inside of it had chipsets from unheard-
of Taiwanese companies (this is were diligence would have saved me time and
money); therefore, they were largely unsupported or had nasty hacks to work
with it.

After four days, I had X.org finally working the way it was supposed to
(including the nvidia graphics card binary!) and after wrangling ndiswrapper
to the ground, I had a fully functional laptop (shutting the lid didn't sleep
it, and X would freak out when I would lift the lid, so not "fully"
functional).

Life was good for a little while until Ubuntu came out with an update. I
figured a system update couldn't be too bad and went for it after backing up
all my data. After that update, X.org stopped working, the wireless card
stopped working, and none of my previous steps to get either working worked. I
decided to give up on that laptop and reasoned this: OS X has a beautiful GUI,
Unix underneath, and everything seems to work "just right". I bought a 13"
Black MacBook that day.

Ever since, I have had 0 problems with it. I'm a heavy user of the command-
line and compile a lot of software on it; updates don't break things, and Time
Machine can rollback anything (not just data) if something _does_ break.
That's good software.

Now, I'm not hating on GNU/Linux by any means - this pivotal experience was
four years ago and I'm sure a lot has changed since then, not to mention my
choice of hardware could have easily moved me in a different direction had I
been more fastidious about checking the hardware compatibility lists. From
that experience, however, and observing the community as a whole over the last
few years, one thing is obvious to me: GNU/Linux isn't meant for the desktop
(speaking of everyday users here, not RMS or your sysadmin). OS X is a desktop
operating system, Windows is a desktop operating system (I'll never touch
windows again, now that I've had Linux and OS X), Haiku (the BeOS fork) is a
desktop operating system (for which I have high high hopes).

I currently, probably, do fewer things in the GUI than most OS X users; I use
the Visor extension for Terminal, I have a fully customized ZSH shell, and I
pretty much live inside of full-screen Emacs - but I do love _interfacing_
with OS X. Fan boy? Not quite, my choice is more of a logical and rational one
arrived at by much experience and experimentation; if Haiku gets to a
reasonably stable stage, I'm sure to switch to that platform more in support
of diversity than any irrational emotional attachment.

~~~
krakensden
Linux sucks because it works poorly with the cheapest, most throwaway hardware
you could find? If you're an adult and willing to buy a computer that works
out of the box, order a laptop from Zareason, or someone else who will pick
working hardware and install Linux for you.

~~~
stepherm
I think the real point here is that each choice has an associated cost. With
Linux, it's the extra time necessary to do this sort of research and
configuration. You can reduce the headaches associated, but the Linux
community doesn't always make that as clear as possible to the customer.

With Apple, instead of the extra time/thought, it's a bit more money to make
the purchase. It also doesn't hurt having a single entity doing most of the
communication and making sure the customer is happy, by making choices/support
relatively simple.

The problem here is that they aren't easy costs to compare, since they are
listed in different resources. I think this is why a lot of Apple users say
things like "You just need to use it.", since quantifying all the little user
experience gains doesn't lend it self well to a comparison of technical specs.

~~~
Ixiaus
"You just need to use it." Sums up the experience well.

------
gacba
Boy meets new Mac. Boy falls in love with Mac. Boy decides to ditch Windows
laptop. +1 Fanboy.

Where's the story here? Because he's a VC this is news?

~~~
thecircusb0y
Thats kinda what I was thinking, but I don't want to be mean, and get voted
down. It just feels like another mac love story. we get it, macs just work,
fantastic for you. There are plenty of OTHER places on the web for the whole
mac addict thing. (Like mac addicts).

------
Malic
I think the writer's point at the end about hardware migration is an undersung
point about the Mac experience. Being able to transfer your files, apps, your
whole OS configuration experience from your old computer to a new one is
painless and has been for quite some time.

I always feel like I need to set aside a day or two when I have to do
something similar to a Windows system. Has that improved with Windows 7?

~~~
thecircusb0y
I've never trusted migration tools to work properly in windows or even on my
mac for that matter. I keep everything organized on a samba share, map the
drive and tweak the registry to point to that drive for the programs and
documents I need.

~~~
darkandbrooding
Over the past decade I've used OS X's firewire migration option... (counts on
fingers) five times for myself and friends. Four of those times the transfer
was flawless and (surprisingly) painless. The one problematic time was because
the new machine arrived with bad RAM; although it booted, the new box was for
all practical purposes DOA. One warranted replacement later, the migration
process worked every bit as well as I'd come to expect.

I think the "app-as-folder" convention and the lack of a central registry are
the main contributors to the success of these migrations. "Move this list of
folders and files from A to B" is a simple, if tedious, task.

FWIW, I have NOT performed that migration on any machine that had Parallels or
VMWare installed; Adobe installs have been the most complicated thing that
I've migrated using this utility. If any readers have used the migration on
machines containing software (vmware, parallels, etc) that adds kernel
extensions, I would be very interested to read the results.

------
pornel
It's hard not to like laptop with 500GB SSD.

~~~
Yaggo
Agree. His MacBook Pro configuration costs a whopping $3,899.00.

------
thought_alarm
OS X won me over in 2005 (in a way that most Linux software never could,
though I certainly gave them a generous chance) and it had a profound effect
on how I design software. I hadn't realized just how entrenched I had become
in Windows mono-culture. After using OS X I was surprised to learn that my
ideas of what good software should be were completely stale and complacent.

------
nevinera
I love macs too! Sadly, I like money rather a lot as well, and those two loves
conflict strongly.

------
mbateman
Apple makes better, prettier, more integrated, etc. laptops. Welcome to 2003.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I was there in 2003 and Exchange, Chrome, iWork etc. mentioned in the post
either didn't exist or didn't work.

Didn't bother me, but there's a whole tranche of people that it did.
Personally I've moved on to a tiny Samsung netbook with Ubuntu (a market Apple
skipped mostly because it's low margin) and much prefer it.

~~~
illumin8
This - it seems like Apple's work on iOS has paid off with perfect integration
with Exchange server. This is a welcome thing that OS/X didn't even have
before Snow Leopard.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Snow Leopards integration with Exchange is very basic. There is no delegation
support, and no ability to access secondary mailboxes which you have
permissions on. Hopefully the new Outlook application for Mac which will
replace Entourage in the next version of Office will fix these problems later
this year.

~~~
illumin8
I've found similar frustrations with the iPad - it works great for basic email
and quick replies, but some of the advanced features like message flagging (I
use "flag for follow up" all the time to mark messages I need to work on
later) are lacking.

------
awa
My feelings for Mac has been mixed, I haven't found it much superior to Win 7
(to warrant the apple tax) and there are things which have annoyed me (e.g.
different shortcuts for doing the same thing in chrome vs. firefox. Some apps
having a full screen mode, some don't.)

I agree with the author that Exchange and chrome works(though flash causes it
to break often) but these work on Windows too, so these are not things I would
want to pay extra for.

I haven't found much in the software to pay extra for the Apple experience, if
I do buy another Mac it'll probably be due to better hardware than anything
else (but I cringe on the thought that I can't upgrade the RAM/hardware myself
though the iMac looks really nice on my desk)

~~~
darkandbrooding
I won't attempt to defend iMac-based hardware upgrades apart from RAM, but
memory is actually extremely easy to replace. Just FYI.
<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3918>

------
stuff4ben
I love my new job! Getting ready to switch from a slightly used Lenovo W500 to
a Core i5 MBP in the next couple of weeks. Developing enterprisey-apps for
Cisco may not be as cool as working at Google, but I love what I'm doing and
the new toys are great too.

------
drivebyacct2
Meh, Windows 7 and OS X provide nearly equally usable user interfaces. The new
taskbar works fantastically, and looks just as nice as the OS X dockbar.
Windows 7 is easy enough to use for the most part, I find nothing harder to
configure than it's OS X counter part. I personally like the Apple hardware a
lot though.

Now if only Linux had a sane DE. I can't stand GNOME or KDE. Gnome is so
inconsistent and hard to configure properly. KDE's defaults for everything and
standard widgets (Esp like in preference dialogs in applications) is just
atrocious.

