Why after years of Windows / Linux, I bought a Macbook

June 8, 2010 Chilling_Silence Personal Rantings

So after being a Microsoft user since back in the days of MSDOS & Windows 3.1, and I’ve been using Linux on and off for the last decade now. I’m still not a fan of Mac Zealots in any way, shape or form. They piss me off no end, and I don’t have time for their nonsense and superiority.

What I can appreciate is the quality of the Mac hardware. From the iPhone to the Magic Mouse to the Macbook, the hardware is *nice*. Sure you can compare it to similar models from the likes of Dell, Toshiba, HP or Asus and it generally works out marginally more expensive, but what I’m getting at, is that there are some very valid reasons why you would want to (Or why I wanted to) get one over a traditional windows-based machine.

This isn’t about to become a windows-bashing exercise, but my thoughts on some of the good and the bad around my new Macbook.

Note: I’ve already noticed that a newer model is out in April, I’ve only had mine 2 months, it must have just come out after I purchased mine. That said I bought mine from PBTech instead of from Apple or Magnum Mac, and got mine for just under $1500 Incl GST. The improved graphics card would have been a nice bonus, but I’m not complaining.

I’ll look at the Hardware first.

The single-sheet glass touchpad is so nice, for me it was essentially like having an iPhone as a touchpad, and the two-finger scroll, pinch to zoom, things like that. It’s a nice quality touchpad, that you very quickly adjust to. Somehow, I’ve not once had an accidental mis-click from resting the palms of my hands on it, though I’m certain it happens semi-regularly as I have that issue with almost every other laptop.

The screen is very nicely balanced compared to the rest of the laptop, when you open it you don’t have to hold down the base as you do with so many other laptops. How this is accomplished, I’m unsure, but it lifts so well and it holds its position no matter where you stick it, half closed, standing upright, wherever.

The Magic Mouse is an absolutely awesome mouse, being able to scroll up, down, left, right, and it’s just such a nice mouse. Being bluetooth is great because it means that I don’t have to worry about having a dongle, even though you can get the Micro receiver mice.

One of my favorite features is the mag-lock AC Power adapter. Having it magnetized is awesome, the number of times I’ve had it get pulled out, rather than place strain on it, I can see it saving both the laptop motherboard AND the power adapter, it’s something that *all* laptops should have! Seriously an incredibly useful feature. A few times it’s even saved the laptop from flying off the couch.
My family goes through a fair few laptops, and the most common reason for them failing is the power adapter, where it plugs in to the laptop. It’s happened now on a couple of Acers, an HP, an Asus, so none are immune to it.

The battery life on it is freaking awesome, I’ve done over 4 hours of solid 3D gaming on battery, using WiFi and Bluetooth, and it still had some juice left in it. That’s crazy! I rarely shut the device down because it resumes from standby instantly, and can stay in standby for a day or two and the battery barely takes a hit.

I don’t know what it is about that Keyboard either, but it’s just plain nice to use!

The LED screen is absolutely stunning. It’s very bright, looks great in all light, and I’ve never seen such a nice screen on any laptop as this.

Hardware = 10 / 10

Then we get to the software

To be honest the Mac OS is nothing super special. One thing I find is that more and more I’m doing less and less in the OS and more and more in the browser itself.

It starts up nice and quick, shuts down fast, it behaves well with respect to asking for Administrative privileges unlike Windows. It’s basically on par with how well Linux does it, only asking for the password when it needs it, when you could potentially be hosing the whole system.

I use Chrome on Windows, Linux & now MacOS, so I don’t really care for Safari, though it shares a lot of similarities with Chrome, it’s certainly a better browser than IE.

Quicktime is nothing short of a PITA which I can’t stand, but installing some random add-in that I found allowed me to play back some non-default-supported codecs and formats such as MKV video. VideoLAN Client also does the same job.

It works nicely with networking too, potentially better with Windows shares than Windows itself. Most of the time when I access my Win7 Desktop, 3/4 the shares are open, but theres 1/4 that need a password. If I’m accessing it from any other windows device they usually just fail. From MacOS I was able to easily hit a button and authenticate with the correct Username and Password details.

Installation of applications is nice, mostly it’s just “drag and drop” to the Applications folder. Same for uninstallation, just drag it to the trash.

It’s also nice not to have to worry about the likes of Anti-Virus or Spyware. While I’m not saying Macs are vulnerability free, it’s still nice.

The way things tie in is also quite nice, like the ability to drag an image from the browser to the desktop just saves it.

Parallels is also pretty cool, albeit a bit slow. The system really needs a little more than 2GB RAM to be fully happy running Parallels without taking a decent performance hit. Lucky for me I don’t need to use Parallels, as everything I do there are Mac-native apps for, or it can be done from the browser.

It’s not an issue opening the likes of windows stuff such as MS Word, Excel or Powerpoint files, and I must admit that iWork is pretty nice. Using Keynote was relatively simple, fast, and the output options are great such as to a Video File, or PDF. +1 to the score there!

Then there’s the stupid things.

If you’ve got multiple monitors, and you thought it was bad in Windows having the Start menu on the wrong window, you should try a Mac. Having the top application menu on the wrong window is even worse! It was simply not well thought-out.

Tried taking a screenshot? Who opens the “Preview” application to do that? Honestly?

There’s a few other stupid things like that, but lets just say that with all it’s nice features, there’s just as many dumb things too.

I would liken it to a Linux distro with some more spit n polish, but after using the latest Ubuntu 10.04, I don’t even quite think it’s on-par with that.

So, while it’s nice in some places and rough in others, all I care about is the ability to load a Browser, so I have to admit I’d rather have the likes of Ubuntu Linux 10.04.

Overall

Things work quite well. The package as a whole is great, and things generally tie in quite well.

To be frank I’d probably only buy Macbooks for laptops, though I like the ability to upgrade Desktops too much to buy a Mac desktop machine. The quality of the hardware is the big thing for me, and it’s a real big thing! It truly is top-notch.

I’m not so sure about the rest, but thankfully for me it doesn’t matter terribly much. It’s not that much of a learning curve compared to what most people think, and to be honest you could sit down most semi-literate people and they’d have no worries. Of course if you were to take your grandma or those people who for some reason can’t deal with change, they’d naturally throw a wobbly about the minor differences. However, they’re just that, minor differences.

Should you buy a Macbook? Yeah, definitely. Don’t expect it to be identical to Windows, but if you can get over that you’ll really enjoy them. I’m yet to find somebody else who’s used my Macbook who hasn’t liked it, when most of them come from a windows background. Should you stick with MacOS on the hardware? To be honest you could install Windows 7 or Linux on to it and probably just as happy either way, if there was no way you could live without Windows. Seems a bit silly because it’ll cost you a fair bit, and if you were going to go with a Mac you might as well use Mac software and make it work for you, but again, it’s realistically a small detail.

I would however be interested in running a small business from Macs, with a Mac server, however for me I’m happy with Google Apps for email etc, it works well enough for me.

As always the usual disclaimer applies, and the last thing I’m looking to do is to get into a debate with Mac / Windows / Linux fanboys in any way, shape or form. That said if you have a genuine question I’d be more than happy to answer it.

Cheers

Chill.

Linux, Mac, Macbook, Operating System, OSX,