In the three weeks I have had my Mac I have done more productive things on it than I could on my Windows box without additional software, hardware and pains to getting it all setup. Dusting off my Unix skills and hitting the forums I have begun to make the Mac perform at the full geek level I require. That was the biggest deterrent all these years from getting a mac before was the unknown of the full flexibility of the OS. I know I could get Windows to do everything I wanted from programming scripts to manipulating the registry. With tender love and care my Windows PC is about 6 years old, home built running Windows Vista. I never understood why so many people had issues with Vista, I never did and I ran everything.
The Mac OS, I am running Lion, is something else altogether. The OS just works. It's so easy to work with, there is minimal guessing to where things are and the usability is fantastic. It's almost too easy to work with, after spending two decades with Windows, I almost miss the work sometimes. If you are a geek like me you still have the full ability to make the Mac however you need it to be.
Right now I have Time Machine doing my backups, upgraded to 12GB of RAM, moved most of my Windows files over to the Mac, hooked up my Yamaha DGX-640 to be a MIDI keyboard in GarageBand, VMWare running Windows 7, and a few other little toys up and going.
The Mac is not without it's faults. The hardware is tight and enclosed. Other than memory the hardware is not designed for home user's upgrades. That is a negative in my eyes, I will miss the ability to swap out the video card, upgrade the fans, slap in another hard drive when I need it. But for $200 the Apple Care is the trade off I guess.
The other big complaint that I have with the Mac is the recovery approach for the OS. Recently with Lion and the new Mac models Apple stopped shipping physical recovery DVDs. Most PCs now do not ship with DVDs to save money, but at least on the Windows there is an option to create boot discs at home. Lion you cannot easily do this. The recovery is fully online. This approach might be fine but this seriously limits the recovery and diagnostic tools if the boot disc and recovery is on the same drive. Right now I'd like to run diagnostic scans of my hard drive but in order to do that I need to boot to another drive or DVD. I can't make a Lion boot disc to do this. Out on the forums this is the biggest gripe I see from the techies out there that Apple changed this.
As for Mac being the center of my home PC world going forward I don't think there is any doubt. I am already starting to lineup getting a Mac Book pro for the Mrs. Macs just work. For anything that I need that is Windows, I am running Windows 7 64-bit on VMWare Fusion 4 and will be loading Windows 8 beta in a few days to play around with.
As the months move on I will get away from .Net programming and move to playing around with XCode and build an iPad app maybe.
End of Line
Posted in: Apple Inc,Microsoft
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