Making the Switch
By Patrick Norton - Posted Feb 26, 2003
Leo and I have been debating the Mac vs. PC split for a while. He often claims that the Mac can do everything a PC can do, yet he just built a 2-GHz Intel Pentium 4-based PC to play games like "Unreal Tournament 2003."
To settle this long-running debate, I borrowed an iBook from Apple to make the switch. For the last three months I've been running OS X Jaguar on a fresh Apple iBook with a combo drive (DVD and CD-RW in one) and an AirPort card for Wi-Fi access.
The switch and the catch(es)
Here are the main issues I came upon during my switch.
- OS X needs a fast, free Web browser that's stable. The latest beta release of Safari makes big strides in this direction.
- One of the most important applications TechTV uses has no Mac version. Avid iNews basically provides the backbone of our show. Everything about the show is managed using iNews. I finally understand the feelings of Mac users in a world dominated by PCs and Windows.
- For the money, the PowerPC processor needs to speed up or get shipped out.
In the words of a friend of mine, those aren't petty criticisms.
Why you should switch
With the criticisms in mind, the Mac holds great promise for users willing to try it.
- The iBook came with more software than I needed, so as long as you don't need an "odd" application, like the iNews package I mentioned earlier, you should be more than OK. Apple bundles great video, photo, and MP3 software, along with an office package. That's just touching the surface.
- OS X may have crashed once in three months, and I may have mistaken an OS crash for the browser going down.
- The hardware really is wonderfully designed, and the OS is not only BSD stable, but it looks great.
- People are starting to make some seriously slick apps (such as Konfabulator) to run on OS X.
The OS isn't the problem
The biggest problem with switching isn't the Mac or OS X. It's when you have to deal with the Windows-centric parts of the world. If you can avoid them (most folks don't need compatibility with odd applications in the office), you could be all set right out of the box with your Mac.
Read on for a deeper explanation of my points above.As I write this, it's 9 p.m. in San Francisco, on Tuesday, February 25. A turkey breast is roasting in the oven. I've got a mason jar full of ice and Dr. Pepper in reach. I'm sitting at my kitchen table staring at an iBook. I'm trying to condense nearly three months of living in OS X ("Patrick and the Switch," as it were) into a few clever words and a handful of lists. It's not one of the simpler things I've tried to do for "The Screen Savers."
I was hoping it would be easier. I was hoping that Leo would be 100 percent right, that the iBook and OS X would prove so superior to any PC running Windows XP that I couldn't help but kick a hole through the ceiling, climb up on the rooftop and shout its praises at every passing soul.
It's not that simple.
There are great things about the Mac. There are things to consider before the switch. There are some things that suck about the Mac. And there are some myths about the Mac that should be debunked. Quickly.
The masses in mind
One of my political-science professors told me that a country gets the government it deserves. Thinking about OS X, I think it's safe to say that most of us aren't brave enough to buck the Windows majority, or are willing to put the time in to work around it. We get the OS we deserve: Windows.
The machines that run Windows are cheap. Most everything is designed for the great hulking mass of Windows users first.The games are plentiful (not quite bread and circuses, but you can't help but wander in that direction when considering the Mac versus PC question). If there's a computer store in your town, chances are it's stocked for PC users.
Which reminds me: Windows has some great Web browser options.
I've been flipping between TextEdit and the Navigator browser, Chimera, which is locked up. (Nothing against AppleWorks. I usually write in basic text editors. In Windows I use WordPad.)
As I write this, I'm watching what I rather less-than-affectionately call the little "rainbow swirly" (the peculiar icon that means your application is busy and won't respond) on my severely locked up browser. Frankly, I'm wondering if my not-quite-crashed browser will resolve its inner problem and let me change browser windows, or if my rather lengthy email to Paul at FireGuys Racing will be lost forever when I break down and force quit Chimera.
(For the uninitiated, force quit is the Mac equivalent of doing the three-fingered salute in Windows. It's like going to the Windows Task Manager and killing an errant application. OS X has slightly different shortcuts than your Windows PC. Learning these shortcuts should be a prime goal of any would-be supergeek when moving to the Mac.)
How can Apple throw in this painfully slow browser, Internet Explorer for Mac 5.2, on the iBook, or any other Mac? This is the company that gives you a solid office suite in AppleWorks, a killer video editor in iMovie, iTunes for your music, iPhoto, a free DVD player, and a rock-solid open operating system.
Apple's Web browser, Safari, is in beta, but I found it to be rather dysfunctional, even for a beta. Safari gets better with every beta release, though.
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