Why I Didn’t Buy A Mac
When I decided to purchase a new PC for the Hand Luggage Only project, I had a pretty open mind about what I might get, but I must admit there was one decision already made: I definitely wasn’t going to buy a Mac.
I was whining on Twitter recently about yet another annoying Windows bug when my brother challenged me: “I still wonder why you put up with it. Vista, I mean.” My brother is an Apple convert of a few years standing, so there’s an implied challenge in here: why haven’t you got yourself a Mac yet?
There are some pragmatic considerations involved (a conservative 90% of the Australian PC market uses Windows, so running a Mac immediately puts you in a minority, which isn’t great when you write about tech for a living). But the answer to that question mostly comes down to a perennial Lifehacker obsession: productivity. I might be inclined to whinge about how Windows works, but I do understand how it works pretty well.
At the very broadest level, if I decided to switch to Mac, I’d be spending a lot of time learning where different features and tweaks were hidden. That certainly wouldn’t have made sense while I was planning to be on the road non-stop for a month (my temper is short enough as it is), and I’m not convinced it would make sense even if I had more time to devote to it.
The Mac is also a very mouse-centric environment, and my work style is designed around using a mouse as little as possible. Yes, I know there are keyboard shortcuts on offer if you choose to dig them up, but the entire platform is still fundamentally based on the notion that drag and drop is a useful way to get things done. That’s not a vision of the world I share at all — pretty much the only time I use drag and drop is to file messages in Outlook, and even that I tend to leave and do in batches. (The same issue is one of the reasons I think iTunes bites.)
I’m also a great believer in working with applications maximised, and that’s pretty much impossible on the Mac because of its “size the windows to the content” philosophy. I realise lots of people like this approach, but for me it just means a screen full of distractions.
A more specific objection to the Mac is that I wouldn’t be able to run Outlook. (Before you say it — no, I’m not prepared to use Parallels or Boot Camp to get that done. For day-to-day work, I want to be running just one OS, thank you.) I’ve written before about how Outlook is an essential element of my day-to-day work, and I’ve yet to see evidence that the various Mac alternatives would meet my needs as well in a single product.
And finally there’s the simple matter of size. Even assuming I could get over all those other objections, there’s no Mac notebook on the market that remotely comes close to the power/size/price combination offered by my Portégé R600. The Air is probably a tad thinner, but it has fewer USB ports and the screen is too big.
So what it really boils down to is a bunch of reasons not to shift versus a lot of enthusiastic claims that “everything just works”. I have a reputation amongst friends and colleagues for being able to find the flaws in pretty much any tech (translation: everything I use tends to crash pretty quickly), and I doubt the Mac would be any different. So it’s really not a difficult decision.
My initial experience with Windows 7 suggests that it may have eliminated some of Vista’s more intractable annoyances. However, even if it turns that Windows 7 also can’t remember folder settings and often treats Wi-Fi as a joke for its own personal amusement, I don’t see myself embracing the book of Jobs any time soon.
Throughout May 2009, Lifehacker Australia editor Angus Kidman will be travelling throughout Australia with just one carry-on bag for the Hand Luggage Only project.
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Comments
I game on my PC.
Enough said? (I work with graphics as well)
I was a PC person until i got my first mac and i instantly fell in love.
my mum has a Toshiba satellite which i believe is a fairly common PC laptop to have these days and althought it may have more ram and more gigs of memory my macbook still runs faster (my macbook also has much more app’s and music/files on it)
i like the fact that i can close my macbook put it to sleep and the next time i open it BAM my screen pops up again where as the satellite will turn itself off and have to reboot
Outlook is shitty and you can get Microsoft Entourage which i believe is the same basic idea as outlook from my experiencing.
or you can just have Hotmail ?
Macbooks keyboard/track pad tricks are really great as they allow quick and easy mobility between pages for example
instead of having to go to the side scroll bar every time to move down the window i can put 2 fingers on the track pad and scroll down .. EASY
or if i want to minimize a screen i simple press APPLE + M, if i want a new tab: Apple + T or if i want to quit a program Apple + Q and there are loads more.
i believe that mac’s are just like PC’s but with better user mobility and you have access to both OS’s which means you get access to awesome programs like Pages or iMovie which is ten times better then notepad or windows movie maker but incase you need those you can just use bootcamp…SIMPLE
things like keyboard tricks, bootcamp and track pad tricks arent meant to hinder your progress and be tricky but are there just incase you need them :)
Some comments (@jaysee, well done) have pointed out that choosing a computer comes down to personal preference, and that some of the things Angus pointed out were misguided. (size, time needed to learn, outlook+blackberry are all relevant- the rest is mac-bashing.)
I’m just sad that the first few comments are flame-ish mac/win fanboys.
Pointing out that many Mac apps can’t be maximised isn’t Mac-bashing; it’s a pretty uncontoversial fact. Some people like that; some (like me) don’t; quite a lot don’t care. But it’s not an attack, and it is a potential factor in choosing a machine.
I currently am running a fully optioned up MacBook Pro Unibody which I have owned for 6 months and is my experience with my Mac.
The actual Operating Sysem is ‘nice’. It’s nice to surf the net with and check my email. However, no matter how much I try for replacements, productivity software on the mac is woeful. Microsoft Office suite is cut down to the point that I want to throw it at a wall, Apple’s alternative ain’t much better and NeoOffice, whilst a generally nice UI, is lacking in the same regards as office. This extends out to my other software. Another bugbear I’ve found is Application management, in that, their is none. I know your supposed to ‘drag and drop it’ to the trash, but the amount of crap which gets left in your ‘library’ is so woeful that it makes Add/Remove under windows look like an advanced piece of alien technology. Lastly, my biggest bugbear, Windows. I am a power user running a x64 copy of Vista (x86 is not practical in my environment). However, Apple’s bootcamp (read, bios emulator) is not fully complete, and I hard lock (freeze) multiple times a day as bootcamp doesn’t support some aspects of microcode in my notebook. Ok, no bios. Lets install via EFI since thats what the mac’s do. Eeep. Can’t do that either since apple in its wisdom didn’t go with the international standard of UEFI, and instead hacked up their own very similiar, but incompatible version of EFI called Apple EFI 1.3 , which means I can’t run windows fully native either.
Add to that a floppy lid, fans initially not ramping up until 80 c (thankfully has been fixed), and a auto adjust screen sensor which is on the blink which turns my screen into a film projector at low light levels make me curse this $4500 laptop.
I will admit though, 2.8ghz 4gb ddr3 9600gt all in the form factor of something the same size as my old 13 inch notebook and about twice as light is a nice considering im always travelling with it. But ‘It just works’ just doesnt fly for me.
@vik – there is no way that Entourage is even close to Outlook, I’m afraid.
Should really try it before you comment on osx. Been using win 95 till vista, decided to convert to mac. Was skeptical at first but it turned out pretty good.
Really happy with my mbp, and i still use my vista everyday when my mbp is on dock.
At the end of the day your the one using it. Just dont judge osx if you dont even know what cmd + tab is for.
People seem to forget and (by the various articles covered by audio magazines).It seems that the MAC has always been catered towards the pro-sumer. Graphics, Film and Audio,Architects etc.For the Professional people who can afford the latest and greatest equipment. That been said with the advent of OSX or BSD I am finding that special free software for music for UNIX, Linux that was a pain to configure is now been made assessable and less time consuming I assume to get up and running on the Apple computer now that steve has switched over to BSD.
I only use XP for Ableton Live the rest I use for PC-BSD. e.g Internet, Documents, You-tube on my Laptop. And I don’t have to run Ad-aware or Spybot destroyer I’ve got better things to do with my time than Pi#% f%^& around trying to get bugs outta my computer that hit “Winbloze Fistya”.
entry level Macs come with 1GB ram. 1GB.. thats not cool. RAM is cheap and thats just rude.
I need Visual Studio 2008 for my day to day tasks. End of story. :)
I’m a (very long time) PC user, but I’ve wanted to try a Mac for years now. There are two things that always stop me:
1. Price. I just can’t justify the added expense, especially when I’m not even sure I’ll prefer it to a PC. Frankly, if Apple offered a great deal for first-time Mac buyers I’m sure they’d get a LOT more switchers… but we all know *that* won’t happen!
2. The text on a Mac always looks a bit blurry to me. Every time I tried reading text on a Mac (in Apple stores) I would practically get a headache. I finally looked into it and found out that I’m not alone… lots of people have complained about this problem. (Don’t believe me? Search for ‘mac blurry fonts’ or something similar.)
So, even though I’m very curious about a Mac, it looks like I’ll be stickin’ with a PC. At least for now. :)
Sorry, a few more things I remembered that keep me from switching to a Mac:
3. There’s a Delete key, but no Backspace key. I use both quite often. Sure, there’s a way to replicate this with a keyboard “shortcut” by pressing an extra key… but isn’t using just one finger a *better* shortcut?
4. No dedicated Home and End keys. I use these keys A LOT. Again: There’s a way to replicate this with a keyboard “shortcut” by pressing an extra key… but isn’t using just one finger a *better* shortcut?
5. Software. I already have a lot of software (for Windows, naturally) and switching over to the Mac equivalent would be expensive and a hassle — (plus some software I use is not made for Mac). This means I’d have to use Parallels or VMware for much of my work… but if I do that, why bother with a Mac, right?
Believe me, I *want* to try a Mac. But there are too many gotchas involved (expense, time, hassles, etc) to actually pull out my credit card.
If anyone has any reasonable solutions for me, I’m open to listening. :)
I would not touch a Mac for so many reasons, not least of which is price and hardware restrictions. Mac Pro from $4499. I spent $1500 on a Core 2 quad 9550 with 8GB RAM, 2×1TB HDD, 800W PSU, Antec 183 case, 1GB Video card and a good motherboard. Running Windows 7 RC1 x64 with no page file and the system is rock solid and lightning fast. Oh yeah, it “just works” too (I have not had to download a single driver). No eyecandy that cannot be turned off either. Is a Mac Pro three times the machine. Not likely.
I ran Ubuntu exlusively for 9 months and had a macbook for 4 months to play with for work testing compatability with the work system. I went back to windows. Mac was all pretty but not better IMO. For home use it makes no difference, everyone should just get over themselves and use whatever the hell they want. For business use it is another story. The Outlook/Exchange combo has no peers, plain and simple and email is important.
I would never buy a Mac, for the same reason that I wont be sucked into the marketing hype around the iphone/ipod. All is overrated, there are far more capable and cost effective options around. The iphone/ipod touch does have a nice screen though…
Good article. I’ve been using Windows PC’s for years, and earlier this year started a job in an all Mac office. After several months on this new job, I can assure you that you’re not missing anything. There is nothing about Macs that is easier, more convenient, faster, or better than PC’s. All these years I’ve wondered why Mac people are so passionate about their OS. Now that I’ve used Mac OS extensively, I’m even MORE baffled by their passion. It’s different for sure, but it is absolutely not better.
And yeah, the “size the window to the content” behavior is the worst! I can’t stand working in one program, while being able to see background applications below the window I’m trying to focus on.
Had to jump in and add my two cents. I changed to a Mac about 12 months ago, and still scratching my head as to why. I have avoided using iPhoto as I want to control the way my photos are organised, not allow iPhoto to rule.
I have had 2 major faults within the past 12 months, the first being a power supply issue and the second being a faulty main board. Plus I have also seen this OS crash and often get the spinning beach ball and have had lots of weird things happen in OSX (equal to Windows).
My next machine will be a windows machine as at least trouble shooting is easier when things go wrong (to fix my wifi issue the apple engineer suggested I “whack’ it and see how that goes).
I use the OS that best suits my overall needs, and at the moment that is still windows.
I find this article very interesting…. when I went to Uni back in 1990, the whole class sat down in front of a lab of Mac SEs. Put in tutorial disks, and turned on the Mac SE’s…. and a couple of hours later everyone was proficient. The same class went into the IBM lab the next day, and it took about twice the time for the same group of people to reach the same level of proficiency. I was a poor student who was looking for a cheap secondhand PC, after that experience I spent my tax return on a second hand mac plus instead. It’s no longer true that the learning experience for beginners is so extreme, but it’s still there to some extent. The other thing I have noticed is that die hard windows users forced to use a mac, will invariably try to do things the complicated way, instead of the simple way. For example, my wife used Word for ages at work, and was used to using a dialog system to select a picture she wanted to insert. First time she wrestled with Pages on the Mac, she couldn’t figure out how to insert a picture. She was shocked when I showed her how to drag and drop it. I know it’s not a scientific study, but it’s a perfect example. Ultimately Angus, if you are happy the way you are, good for you. If you want to use a complicated wizard to do some task that on a mac can be done with a simple gesture… then that’s your thing. And learning the keyboard shortcuts CAN be difficult because they are “muscle memory”, but it’s worth it once you do.
I think there’s often a danger of confusing the notion of “intuitive” or “simple” with “what you’re used to”. Would the same outcome have held true if the tutorials were in reverse order, or would the Mac stuff have taken longer as people tried to apply the PC principles they learned today? (Windows was not dominant in 1990 in any case — had the same think happened in 1995, I doubt the contrast would have been anywhere near as great.)
In your Pages example, I don’t think dragging and dropping is any simpler than clicking on an Insert Picture button (or menu item) — it’s just a different approach. What I’m certain of is that it’s slower than if you know the keyboard shortcuts.
And you can definitely take any interface metaphor too far. The example that always struck me was ejecting a disc from the Mac by dragging it to a garbage bin. That’s a drag and drop action, but a stupid one that always has to be explained to people.
I don’t get how people want to switch due to Macs being “safer” considering I haven’t been using antivirus for close to 5 years now straight. I have gotten trojans, and they were direct downloads that I stupidly opened manually, then removed manually. I guess if you’re a total newbie and don’t plan on learning how a real computer works, a Mac is fine for you. Though I’d suggest something like openSUSE or Ubuntu years before I’d suggest a Mac.