Having just purchased my second Mac in 13 months (a MacBook Pro, upgrading from a white MacBook) I guess I'm part of the problem.
I got my first iPod a few years ago and really liked it. I got the first nano when it came out because I wanted something smaller and lighter. I got the 2nd gen nano when it came out because I wanted something tougher and with a little more capacity. Last summer I won an iPhone (although I was ready to buy one) and it's my favourite technology device ever, even though it's not perfect. I got a 160gb Classic in the fall to replace the nano - the iPhone actually replaced the nano. They just finally put out an iPod that would carry every song I like on it. Every one. And even a lot of other stuff. I tend to use it when I know I'll want to listen to music - working out, if I want to unwind before going to sleep, etc.
I originally got the MacBook because I figured I'd be able to dual boot Windows XP and dabble with Mac stuff a little. There was definitely a learning curve, and the Mac is anything but intuitive for Windows power users, but Mac OS X became my OS of choice after about a month of playing with it. Now I'm all Mac, and getting a lot more done than I did before with Windows.
I love that it's pure Unix underneath the glossy front-end. For people who like to dig under the hood, it's way easier to tinker with than Windows. All of the system APIs are easily exposed and ready for your use. System-wide services and automator scripts take away the drudgery of little annoyances that I used to have to do manually. For instance, if I want to watch a TV show, I just fire up the Xbox and play something from my Mac on my television, since I have automated the recording/downloading, re-encoding if necessary, and moving of content. Sure, it wasn't that big of a deal to do all of that manually, but I figure the Mac saves me maybe 5-10 minutes a day just unzipping, re-encoding, and manipulating media files.
Here's a more practical example - I've been using
Coda for web development. With the web apps that I work on it's not uncommon to edit a half a dozen files to add one feature - and then test, then edit a few of them again, repeat as needed. With my Windows workflow I'd have a browser, ftp client, text editor, and terminal window, open all at once, and I'd have to upload a file to one directory, change the path in two places (locally and remotely), upload another, change two paths, upload another, etc. That gets old really, really fast.
In Coda I have one window open, which I can split between whatever tasks I'm working on at the time, and when I make changes and need to upload I push one button and press F5 to refresh the browser pane. I figure Coda saves me an HOUR or TWO a day in maintenance.
Are there Windows programs that can do this? Not really, but let me say that there *could* be. It's not necessarily the technical features of the OS that makes Windows suck. I mean, there are technical suckaries about Windows, don't get me wrong, but it's just a different way of thinking about the problem.
Windows devs seem to think "How many features can I cram into this program? Oh look, there's a 12x12 pixel spot of screen real estate - let's throw another button there!" whereas Mac devs seem to think "How many features can we remove to get out of the users' way and help them solve their problems or get their work done?"
The "just works" ethos is pretty powerful. If you really need to do something complicated, you can (although maybe not with the consumer-level app, but that's true on Windows too), and because Apple values good design the 3rd party Mac developers that get attention tend to focus on good design and usability too.
The iPod is probably the least-featured media player out there right now. Even cheapie throw-aways have *more* features. But how well are those features implemented?
I've owned a few other mp3 players, and before I bought my last iPod I looked around to see what else was out there. The Zune was actually a close contender, but it wouldn't work with my Mac and a lot of its features are crippled, like sharing songs (3 plays or 3 days? Fuck you 3 times!) or watching video (although I think it now plays AVC/h.264 files, which are pretty ubiquitous now - h.264 is the mp3 of video).
Anyway, Mac isn't for everybody, but I think people are surprised by how powerful it is. At geek conferences I tend to see a ratio of about 3:2 Macs to PCs, and a lot of those PC users are running Ubuntu or some other flavour of free software.
Someone described the Mac as a computer for people who love computers. That sounds about right, although I've known people who have hated their computers before getting a Mac.
Oh, also, my iPod did not work anywhere near as well with my Windows machine as it has with my Macs. It's clearly designed to work with a Mac and they kinda sorta support Windows.
Having said that, Safari for Windows is the best Windows browser you can get now. It's really fast and good with memory (much, much better than Firefox, which I should say is the browser I'm using now to type this) so it even runs well on really old computers.
Full disclosure: I own an insignificant amount of Apple stock, which I purchased months after owning my first Mac.
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Topic: I hate Apple (Read 26552 times)