The few, the proud, the Mac owners
I’ve officially been a Mac user for 24 hours now (though my first computer many years ago was a Mac), and I’m loving it. I am starting to wonder why I ever switched to PC—I hope I don’t become cultish…
I bought an iMac, but I bought the top of the line so that I wouldn’t question my decision later. There’s something about these machines that inspires creativity, and while that’s hard to put into words, the difference between this computer and the three Dells I’ve been working on for the last couple of years isn’t:
- The display is brilliant—as in unbelievably bright.
- Despite my attempts to bog it down with downloads and dozens of open applications, it’s incredibly fast.
- It’s intuitive (again, I haven’t been on a Mac in years—yet I figured out what I needed in a matter of a few minutes).
- It really does run Windows better than a PC; if all the programs I use were available for Mac, I’d switch completely, but running Parallels, I actually like Vista…somewhat.
- It’s ready when I need it. I realize that the iMac is intentionally simplified, but the fact that I was went from box to browsing (the Web) in under five minutes is astounding to me. Beyond that, the computer powers on and off in a fraction of the time my Vista laptop does.
I don’t say all of this to pick on PCs (or their users) or to give in to the Mac hype, but there is a noticeable difference, at least at this point.
In case it’s of value to others, here are the programs I’ve already installed, in order of importance (* denotes free software):
- *Firefox
- *Dropbox
- Adobe CS4
- *Tweetdeck
- *Fugu
- Ecto
- *Open Office
- Vmware Fusion
- *Flickr Uploadr
- *Skype
- *Quicksilver
- TextMate
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Posted in Personal
December 6th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Don’t you just love them? Before OS X, I hated them, but I think Apple really turned their products around.
The design is unparalleled. It’s almost as if Apple consults a “Most annoying things about computers” before they design their computers so as to make them painless for users. Let’s just hope viruses don’t shift their focus too much. :/ It’s nice not having to worry about malware as much (obviously they still go around), if at all.
Adobe CS4? Ouch. What did that cost you?
December 6th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Yeah, it’s hard to beat. So, when did you use a pre-OSX mac? The original versions came out when you were still in elementary school.
As for usability, Apple has a knack for knowing what works and what’s easiest.
CS4 is almost mandatory for my projects, so I sucked it up. But I also got a huge discount - a combination of the Adobe education discount and Apple’s pricing for new computers. You should be able to get the same pricing.