It’s a strange sensation to be in PowerPC land. To those that don’t know, that was the (IBM) technology which Macs were previously built on, before moving to the much more flexible and powerful Intel platform. My first Mac, bought in 2004, was a G4 iBook. I loved it and remember even writing an ode to it on this weblog. It is currently still alive in the, hopefully, responsible hands of a family-member.
What made the G4 special was that there was no going back to Windows. You could emulate it, v e r y s l o w l y , but you really had to make due with what Mac OS X offered you and I loved that idea of being stranded on an island and having to make the best of it. As a result, I learned a lot about my Mac and it also spawned plenty of blog posts on better Mac productivity here.
But now that I am on a Macbook and have been logging on to Windows via Bootcamp regularly, my reality has somewhat changed.
H A R D W A R E !!!
Macs vs. PCs… I was always aware of the hardware differences, particularly quality-wise. If you do the simple math, my 2004 iBook, now 5 years old and expected to last at least 2 years longer. I don’t know what it’s like in PC-world (not the mag), but I imagine you won’t get this kind of return on investment (ROI) under EUR 1000 ($1500). And by ROI, I mean, on the road ROI, as my laptop was constantly with me travelling. If you have a dusty EUR 200 ($300) PC server lying around somewhere, I expect that will probably last you half a decade as well.
I’m pretty certain that today, if I were to choose either Windows or OS X, I would still buy Apple, simply because they build their machines so damn well. Dvorak, when the Macbook Pros were just launched, called them the Bentleys of computers, and I whole-heartedly agree.
S O F T W A R E !!!
My post today is really about the software-war, which is what most Apple (and Windows) fanboys seem to focus on. And I’m here to tell you that there is no more software-war! Apart from a few (somewhat important) design-flaws in Windows (unfortunately I haven’t tested Vista or 7 yet), the migration between both platforms is fairly flawless.
All the major applications exist on both platforms: Office, programming, designing, picture- and video-manipulation. I don’t want to step on anyone’s territory, I know that, for some of those, Macs are better and for others, PCs are. But for the everyday-consumer like me, you can use both platforms as a tool.
Where I was mostly worried, ironically, was not anything that was inherent to the Mac platform, though I did argue partially that it was some time ago. It’s a free software called Quicksilver, which allows you to launch apps, find and manipulate files more quickly than using shortcuts and the mouse, or even Spotlight. It has taken over my day-to-day so much, that I no longer have files lying around on my desktop, the Dock, and rarely use the Finder either. The reason is that, for launching stuff, using the keyboard together with search, is much much faster than going somewhere “manually.” Imagine doing the same on the internet and browsing to every address individually, instead of having Google and predictive text…
But even that has no longer become a problem on Windows due to a number of alternatives that exist and of which I chose SlickRun as my number 1 replacement.
I will not go into the Design aspects of the Mac OS, which are without a doubt superior to Windows (XP at least). But where software as a tool is concerned, the war is over! I can survive just as well on Windows as I have on OS X.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, perhaps marks an end to my pro-Mac posts (though, let’s wait for Snow Leopard to be sure). Who knows, I may eventually even (gasp!) post a review of a Windows software here soon.
Vincent
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