Posted by Florian Wardell | 8 comments
Why I switched to Mac
I was raised with PCs. My dad used to work for IBM. I remember being intrigued by this mysterious “Internet” that we had at home when still very few people had access to it. My dad would refer to it all the time. I remember the monstrous Thinkpad, resting on that desk, in the dark, with all the little LEDs changing colors and stuff, the sound of the modem. I also remember spending hours in front of it playing minesweeper or pack-man-like games. Most of my friends know me as a PC person. I used to say stuff like “Mac? Pfft. Looks great, but that’s it. No control over it. It’s a pretty screen with browsing ability.”
My mom had a mac. I hated it. It was a white macbook. I found it slow, I hated the fact that you could not maximize windows with a single click, and now and then, we had to send it in because the screen detached itself from the body, etc… It wasn’t great publicity to my eyes.
So when I was 16, I bought a PC. My first one (I used one of my dad’s before). I still remember the day. It was in Cambodia. I had a look at all three computer shops in the country, and after 2 or 3 days of browsing forums and asking for advice, my choice was made: A Vaio VGN-AR620E would be mine. It’s a nice computer, 17 inch screen, 2GB of ram, 2.1 Core2Duo, and a dedicated NVidia GPU.
Design wise, and for a PC, it was topnotch. The screen was gorgeous, and the speed was really good too, compared to the previous Pentium based PCs I used to work on. It came with Vista Home Premium, and a LOT of bloatware.
Let me stress a point here: I know many people hate Vista, they find it slow, sluggish, bugy, etc… Now, many people don’t deinstall bloatware. Who needs four media centers on a single unit? Who needs five burn programs? Frankly, nobody. True, Vista was slow compared to XP, but once I had reformatted the HD, once I had done a clean a reinstall of Vista without the bloatware, it ran like a breeze. Seriously. I was stunned by the performance. To put in a nutshell: I like Vista. It looks nice, runs pretty fast once it’s tweaked, and it’s really easy to use. And Windows7 is even better.
However, the computer was heavy, the screen got scratched too easily, and the battery life was unbearably short (1-1h30). I kept on getting viruses. I reformatted twice.
One day, I got accepted into this big uni in France (Sciences Po Paris), where more that 50% of the students work on macs. From time to time, I borrowed one. That’s how I discovered Keynote, which we don’t have on PCs, right? Nor do we have iPhoto. Or GarageBand. Compared to my mom’s mac, which had a desktop filled with .psd files, which had a 95% full HD, my friend’s unibody macbook was a race car. Oh! And the mouse gestures. And the dashboard.
You get the point =) I decided to get a mac, sooner or later. Meanwhile, my old Vaio was still functional, but I began to realize how heavy it was by carrying it everyday to the uni. I decided to find a short term solution to the problem and bought an Asus EeePc 901, which came with a very poor Linux distribution called Xandros. I immediately installed eeebuntu, which was much better looking, more functional and specially tuned for for the Eee (custom kernel, drivers, etc..).
I’m mentioning this to avoid “Forget Windows and OSX, go Linux” comments. I did try linux, found it surprisingly easy to use, but i wasn’t satisfied by it. Without custom themes, it looked childish. The eee was so slow it could barely playback a Youtube video. Right now, I’m using the Eee as an electronic notepad in class. One thing is sure, its size is amazing, and so is its price.
Let’s go back to Mac vs. Pc: After a while, my Vaio kept on crashing, the screen started feeling loose, and it eventually completely detached itself from the body. The webcam didn’t work anymore (a bad contact, apparently), the screen began flickering, and it overheated far too easily. Numerous times, a blue screen simply deleted hours of works on papers. I was starting to feel really frustrated.
Thanks to deals between my uni and Apple, I was able to buy a Macbook Pro, Late 2008, unibody.
This is the computer I’m writing this blog post on right now. Let’s face it, it looks incredibly sexy. As soon as I unboxed it, the design, feel and finish of that thing left a smile on my face. The screen is gorgeous, and I still haven’t scratched it one bit – After 3 months of intensive use – which is quite important when you’re into design and photo retouching. The unibody design does seem to be very sturdy, there are no moving parts. You can say whatever you want about OSes, but Apple is the best when it comes to hardware quality.
I fired it up, watched the beautiful introduction video, put all my data in, and it was ready to go. That’s right, no virus scanner to install, no bloatware to deinstall, no programs to activate. It was just ready. I plugged my pictures dedicated HD and iPhoto imported everything, scanned it for faces (with great accuracy) and ordered it by events. Same goes for music and iTunes. I quickly installed iWorks (the Apple suite comparable to Ms Office) and fired Keynote up, because I had to do a presentation for tomorrow’s law class. I was blown away by its beautiful design, transitions, and speed.
By the way, speed: This was the main disappointment for me, regarding the MBP. This thing is hardly faster than my old Vaio, even though the processor is better, it has faster ram, and the GPU is superior. In fact, I couldn’t play a 1080p .mkv movie with VLC. It either died or played at about 10 fps (The issue resolved thanks to VLC maturing to 1.0 and OSX to Snow Leopard, which I have since then installed). Boot time is actually longer on OSX than on a clean Vista. But who cares about two extra seconds, because what you get for those two seconds is worth anything you could ever find on Windows.
OSX is *really* good. It looks good. It works well. I got used to the right click issue. I got used to the maximized windows issue (Ask yourself: “why do we actually maximize windows if we don’t need to?”). iLife is fantastic, and so are Preview, Expose, Spotlight. etc… A bunch of features i could not live without anymore.
I know the Apple price premium has been quite controversial lately, and it’s true that macs are generally more expensive. But I now understand why. You get a stable, reliable, functional, innovative and good looking OS on a beautifully designed machine.
So, what’s my point? Well, it’s going to be a classic conclusion: Choose your OS depending on what you want to do with you computer. Remember that windows is an OS that can be installed on millions of *different* machines, while OSX is fine tuned for a couple of computers. A PC can do everything: Gaming, programing, image editing, and what not. A mac, however, can run all operating systems available, with the help of Apple’s Bootcamp which means it can do even more, despite people saying mac software is limited. While its functionality (especially in the gaming area) is not as developed as a PCs, it’s getting there, with major software and gaming titles being released for it.
So will I ever switch back to PC? Probably not. I enjoy Snow Leopard and Windows 7, which I have installed on my mac as a parallel OS and use to play Flight Simulator. One you’ve switched, you’ll never go back. True.
What OS do you use? Use the poll to give us an insight on your preferences and don’t hesitate to comment!
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Thumbnail courtesy: Drewsof
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