Like most of the publishing world, we must use Macintosh computers here at work. I don’t think of myself as a
"Mac person," and "Mac people" actually tend to annoy me. They go on and on about all the things their neato Macs can do and I just think to myself, you don’t know the half of it. To the PC person, the Mac is a very guided experience. There are a limited number of programs and everyone uses the same ones. There’s not as much weird, occasionally wonderful, use-at-your-own risk software out there. In an ironic way, the Mac is all business – it’s there for you to use in its intended manner, not for you to tweak endlessly. You use it to accomplish projects, and it doesn’t want to be a project itself. And you can’t play games on it.
Tweaking does come at a price – I don’t expect a PC to last forever. And indeed mine hasn’t. Over the past three years I’ve installed and uninstalled more crap (I currently have at least 10 file-sharing programs on it, three different graphics programs and countless video and audio players) and pushed more files through it than I should have. (Note to self: Always buy the biggest hard drive available.) I don’t know what, technically, afflicts it now; it just seems very tired. I start it up and get a couple of hours of work out of it before the virtual memory is full and every simple task takes… an… eternity… to… complete. Reboot.
It is time for me to buy a new computer; unfortunately Microsoft is launching its new Windows Vista operating system at the same moment. Unfortunate because I don’t have the greatest faith in Microsoft’s brand-spanking-new products. Years ago I bought a computer loaded with Windows Millennium Edition, which was junk. And though I’ve learned to live with XP, and I appreciate that it is good in many ways, it’s not perfect and wasn’t from day one. (Interesting page here documenting XP’s issues over the years. I don’t know what’s more remarkable – the number of problems I’ve had or the number I haven’t.)
Another issue: The variety of Vista versions. With such a range of options, and such a gulf in price between the bottom- and top-of-the-line, I can’t help but think of Windows ME. I think Microsoft likes to punish people who try to go cheap.
I’m really on the fence. I might buy a Mac, even though I still find Mac people annoying. But Vista worries me—watch the demo here—with all its solutions to things I didn’t think were problems. All this needless 3-D trickery looks like trouble to me. The selling point is that Vista is “easier than ever”—I’ve never heard anyone complain that XP is "too hard." They complain that it’s buggy, or it breaks, or it makes too many choices for you. That seems to be a rule—the slicker the interface, the harder it is to make it behave just the way you want it to. If I want a lot of choices made for me, if I want a computer even a caveman could use ...
... I’d buy a Mac. And I just might. Oh, the shame.
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Comments on this entry:
Dude, I hear you about Windows Me and understand your reservations about Vista, but don't become a Mactard. There is a reason only 3% of the world uses them. The only reason you're forced to use it in publishing is because your art directors graduated from design school in the '80s, so everyone else has to bend to what they learned. Come on, you know it's true. Think of all the games and software you won't be able to run on a Mac. Think about just how small that Mac shelf is in your local computer store. If it weren't for the iPod, Macs would have disappeared years ago. Damn them.
Honey, you can buy a new Mac and install Apple's Boot Camp or Parrells Desktop on it, which would allow you to run any crappy Windows OS of choice. Then you'd be set to go with whatever headaches Microsoft throws at you.
MACs are for college students and people who like bright colors and shiny objects. Buy a MAC and be prepared to restart, restart, and restart again. As someone also in magazine publishing, I hope you don't plan to use it for Word, or god forbid, run multiple programs at once. There must be SOME reason the world favors PCs!
This is one of those endlessly entertaining and annoying debates. I'm also a magazine editor, and I've used PCs and Apples. I prefer Apples (I'm amazed by some of the above comments; my home and office Macs need to be restarted about 1/20th the number of times that my PCs did), but, that said, there really ain't that big of a difference. You want Word and Excel? They work fine on Mac. You want games? Mac has them — though I suspect you shouldn't be playing games at work ...
While it's true that we Mac users produce enough Smug to pollute an entire South Park episode, we have an excuse for our overbearing attitudes. While the Win-Tel boys simply throw every half-baked idea at you (like Windows ME), the Mac developers actually think things through before release, meaning that the user does not pay to be the beta tester. I'm about to order a MacBook Pro, to replace the machine on which I now type. I bought this iMac in 1999, and it has served me faithfully ever since. Never have I installed anti-viral software, and never once has it suffered an infection. (The whole Y2K thing passed without any worry on my part; a month later, a Windows user of my acquaintance was sending me electonic mail dated year 100.) It has withstood daily internet use since purchase, all without any inconvenience. By contrast, my company recently "upgraded" my work PC to a brand-new, top-of-the-line notebook PC. I have since made multiple trips to the corporate service center, had the thing "flattened and re-imaged" (geek-speak for "format c:/"), and, despite all of that, I have had to endure multiple annoyances. (Although a notebook PC, it hates to make the transition between my desk and mobile use!) For games, get an Xbox or PlayStation; the latter doubles as a very nice DVD player for the living room. Whatever you choose, do it based upon your needs, not upon the biased opinions of either side. Good luck with your new purchase. (Oh yeah, a girlfriend who was an accountant, and therefore a Windows user, once sneered at my iMac, and openly wondered when I'd get a "real computer". Guess who spent several hours in front of her PC, loading anti-viral software? Well, at least she did look great in a thong!)
What kind of editor would prefer a Mac? Do you ever do research on the Web? Visit movie websites? Access video and audio files on major corporate websites? Try to access web pages with forms? On a Mac, you have to switch between three browsers to find one that works best (a lot of media-rich web pages are not Mac friendly). Videos work sporadically, filling out forms is a mess. It brings your work to a grinding halt. I have this elegant windowpane of an Apple on my desk that mocks me. "Hey, don't I look cool? I can't help you get what you need on the web but, hey, I look slick." They are not business machines...they're for teenage girls who have a photo collection or want to download crap from iTunes.
No editor worth the ink his mag is printed on would promote a kerning-challenged machine like the crApple. When it comes to important things like, oh, researching on the Internet and entering a story into Word, guess some people are distracted by the glossy packaging, the pretty colors on the screen and the little iTunes it plays!
I concur with your assessment of the Macs. I think its simplicity is **not** a selling point - some things **shouldn't** be simple. It makes me nervous when I go into a bookstore and see a title like "Nuclear Reactor Operation and Maintenance for Dummies". Similarly, a computer should not be a "dummies" product, like a glorified flashlight. It's for **computing** things, for heaven's sake! Since when was computing anything supposed to be a simple task?
Anyway, I also share your reservations about buying a PC with Vista. You should be able to buy XP PCs for a long time to come - I bought a Win2K PC a couple of years after XP was already on the market and pre-installed on most PCs on the store shelves, for example. Businesses always buy PCs with tried-and-true operating systems long after the "upgraded" OS is on the market. If your (consumer-oriented) local store has only Vista PCs, just go online to Dell or HP etc. and choose the "Small Business" rather than the "Home" models. As for me, I've installed the .NET 3.0 Framework on my XP machine, so I can already do the most important Vista operations (WPF and WCF) under XP. I do **not** want Vista's much-hyped "security" features, which are really Digital Rights Management features (i.e., security for movie studios etc. against perceived piracy, not security for users who want control over their own digital files).
Oh - the slowdown you have on booting sounds as if all the software installing and removing you've done has left you with a really cluttered registry. Clean it out.
mac users are a pretty funny bunch, they pay inflated prices for inferior products then walk around acting like they're cooler than everyone else. obviously it's some sort of defense mechanism; after you've spent all your money on a piece of crap, you can either admit you were wrong, or spend your time trying a little too hard to convince everyone else it's not a turd and they should buy one too so you don't feel so bad about yourself.
so, you just have to ask yourself, do you want to pretend to be cool or get a computer you can actually use?