7 ms·

The Mac Won Me Over

38 points by matthewphiong 16y ago

Malic 16y ago
I think the writer's point at the end about hardware migration is an undersung point about the Mac experience. Being able to transfer your files, apps, your whole OS configuration experience from your old computer to a new one is painless and has been for quite some time. I always feel like I need to set aside a day or two when I have to do something similar to a Windows system. Has that improved with Windows 7?
- roadnottaken 16y ago
  No.
- thecircusb0y 16y ago
  I've never trusted migration tools to work properly in windows or even on my mac for that matter. I keep everything organized on a samba share, map the drive and tweak the registry to point to that drive for the programs and documents I need.
  - darkandbrooding 16y ago
    Over the past decade I've used OS X's firewire migration option... (counts on fingers) five times for myself and friends. Four of those times the transfer was flawless and (surprisingly) painless. The one problematic time was because the new machine arrived with bad RAM; although it booted, the new box was for all practical purposes DOA. One warranted replacement later, the migration process worked every bit as well as I'd come to expect. I think the "app-as-folder" convention and the lack of a central registry are the main contributors to the success of these migrations. "Move this list of folders and files from A to B" is a simple, if tedious, task. FWIW, I have NOT performed that migration on any machine that had Parallels or VMWare installed; Adobe installs have been the most complicated thing that I've migrated using this utility. If any readers have used the migration on machines containing software (vmware, parallels, etc) that adds kernel extensions, I would be very interested to read the results.
stuff4ben 16y ago
I love my new job! Getting ready to switch from a slightly used Lenovo W500 to a Core i5 MBP in the next couple of weeks. Developing enterprisey-apps for Cisco may not be as cool as working at Google, but I love what I'm doing and the new toys are great too.
Ixiaus 16y ago
While the refinements of OS X and the Apple Mac hardware have been big sellers for me, it was ultimately, the combination of a beautiful and intuitive GUI coupled with an underlying Unix system. I know Windows has got Cygwin, it just "isn't the same" though. My story began with a $200.00 laptop and GNU/Linux. I spent four days installing and configuring GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) on that poor laptop; I should have been more diligent about checking up on hardware compatibility... The roaches were X.org and the f'ing wireless card. This laptop was $200.00 for a reason. It turns out many of the parts inside of it had chipsets from unheard-of Taiwanese companies (this is were diligence would have saved me time and money); therefore, they were largely unsupported or had nasty hacks to work with it. After four days, I had X.org finally working the way it was supposed to (including the nvidia graphics card binary!) and after wrangling ndiswrapper to the ground, I had a fully functional laptop (shutting the lid didn't sleep it, and X would freak out when I would lift the lid, so not "fully" functional). Life was good for a little while until Ubuntu came out with an update. I figured a system update couldn't be too bad and went for it after backing up all my data. After that update, X.org stopped working, the wireless card stopped working, and none of my previous steps to get either working worked. I decided to give up on that laptop and reasoned this: OS X has a beautiful GUI, Unix underneath, and everything seems to work "just right". I bought a 13" Black MacBook that day. Ever since, I have had 0 problems with it. I'm a heavy user of the command-line and compile a lot of software on it; updates don't break things, and Time Machine can rollback anything (not just data) if something does break. That's good software. Now, I'm not hating on GNU/Linux by any means - this pivotal experience was four years ago and I'm sure a lot has changed since then, not to mention my choice of hardware could have easily moved me in a different direction had I been more fastidious about checking the hardware compatibility lists. From that experience, however, and observing the community as a whole over the last few years, one thing is obvious to me: GNU/Linux isn't meant for the desktop (speaking of everyday users here, not RMS or your sysadmin). OS X is a desktop operating system, Windows is a desktop operating system (I'll never touch windows again, now that I've had Linux and OS X), Haiku (the BeOS fork) is a desktop operating system (for which I have high high hopes). I currently, probably, do fewer things in the GUI than most OS X users; I use the Visor extension for Terminal, I have a fully customized ZSH shell, and I pretty much live inside of full-screen Emacs - but I do love interfacing with OS X. Fan boy? Not quite, my choice is more of a logical and rational one arrived at by much experience and experimentation; if Haiku gets to a reasonably stable stage, I'm sure to switch to that platform more in support of diversity than any irrational emotional attachment.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
etherael 16y ago
a month ago I bought a 27" iMac reasoning that even if the operating system is as bad as my limited experience suggested up front it was still nice hardware and I could always just install Linux on it afterwards. One month onward I find myself liking the OS even less rather than more but have not had time to figure out what I would need to do to install Ubuntu dualboot either and thus when using the machine still find myself frustrated with arbitrary macisms that afflict it. The only part of the system I remain impressed with is the screen. This box cost 2700$ aud. Meanwhile when it came time to get a new notebook I grabbed an Asus n61jq with a faster CPU more memory and a better video card that ran Ubuntu flawlessly with a single xorg tweak for almost exactly half the price of the iMac
thought_alarm 16y ago
OS X won me over in 2005 (in a way that most Linux software never could, though I certainly gave them a generous chance) and it had a profound effect on how I design software. I hadn't realized just how entrenched I had become in Windows mono-culture. After using OS X I was surprised to learn that my ideas of what good software should be were completely stale and complacent.
awa 16y ago
My feelings for Mac has been mixed, I haven't found it much superior to Win 7 (to warrant the apple tax) and there are things which have annoyed me (e.g. different shortcuts for doing the same thing in chrome vs. firefox. Some apps having a full screen mode, some don't.) I agree with the author that Exchange and chrome works(though flash causes it to break often) but these work on Windows too, so these are not things I would want to pay extra for. I haven't found much in the software to pay extra for the Apple experience, if I do buy another Mac it'll probably be due to better hardware than anything else (but I cringe on the thought that I can't upgrade the RAM/hardware myself though the iMac looks really nice on my desk)
- darkandbrooding 16y ago
  I won't attempt to defend iMac-based hardware upgrades apart from RAM, but memory is actually extremely easy to replace. Just FYI. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3918 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3918
mbateman 16y ago
Apple makes better, prettier, more integrated, etc. laptops. Welcome to 2003.
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  I was there in 2003 and Exchange, Chrome, iWork etc. mentioned in the post either didn't exist or didn't work. Didn't bother me, but there's a whole tranche of people that it did. Personally I've moved on to a tiny Samsung netbook with Ubuntu (a market Apple skipped mostly because it's low margin) and much prefer it.
  - illumin8 16y ago
    This - it seems like Apple's work on iOS has paid off with perfect integration with Exchange server. This is a welcome thing that OS/X didn't even have before Snow Leopard.
    - mike-cardwell 16y ago
      Snow Leopards integration with Exchange is very basic. There is no delegation support, and no ability to access secondary mailboxes which you have permissions on. Hopefully the new Outlook application for Mac which will replace Entourage in the next version of Office will fix these problems later this year.
      - illumin8 16y ago
        I've found similar frustrations with the iPad - it works great for basic email and quick replies, but some of the advanced features like message flagging (I use "flag for follow up" all the time to mark messages I need to work on later) are lacking.
  - mbateman 16y ago
    Fair enough. Exchange in particular seems to be a big deal. So maybe this is a nice example of the "halo" effect: people see exchange working on their newfangled iOS devices and realize it will work on Macs, with the added bonus that it's easier to sync those newfangled devices to Macs. This effect also seems to be working on Apple, not just it's customers: selling mobile devices seems to be making Apple more enterprise friendly, so that they work more seriously on things like Exchange support.
gacba 16y ago
Boy meets new Mac. Boy falls in love with Mac. Boy decides to ditch Windows laptop. +1 Fanboy. Where's the story here? Because he's a VC this is news?
- thecircusb0y 16y ago
  Thats kinda what I was thinking, but I don't want to be mean, and get voted down. It just feels like another mac love story. we get it, macs just work, fantastic for you. There are plenty of OTHER places on the web for the whole mac addict thing. (Like mac addicts).
pornel 16y ago
It's hard not to like laptop with 500GB SSD.
- gojomo 16y ago
  I'd guess his Windows laptop was similarly tricked-out.
- Yaggo 16y ago
  Agree. His MacBook Pro configuration costs a whopping $3,899.00.
nevinera 16y ago
I love macs too! Sadly, I like money rather a lot as well, and those two loves conflict strongly.
drivebyacct2 16y ago
Meh, Windows 7 and OS X provide nearly equally usable user interfaces. The new taskbar works fantastically, and looks just as nice as the OS X dockbar. Windows 7 is easy enough to use for the most part, I find nothing harder to configure than it's OS X counter part. I personally like the Apple hardware a lot though. Now if only Linux had a sane DE. I can't stand GNOME or KDE. Gnome is so inconsistent and hard to configure properly. KDE's defaults for everything and standard widgets (Esp like in preference dialogs in applications) is just atrocious.

38 points by matthewphiong 16y ago

Malic 16y ago

I think the writer's point at the end about hardware migration is an undersung point about the Mac experience. Being able to transfer your files, apps, your whole OS configuration experience from your old computer to a new one is painless and has been for quite some time. I always feel like I need to set aside a day or two when I have to do something similar to a Windows system. Has that improved with Windows 7?

roadnottaken 16y ago
No.
thecircusb0y 16y ago
I've never trusted migration tools to work properly in windows or even on my mac for that matter. I keep everything organized on a samba share, map the drive and tweak the registry to point to that drive for the programs and documents I need.
- darkandbrooding 16y ago
  Over the past decade I've used OS X's firewire migration option... (counts on fingers) five times for myself and friends. Four of those times the transfer was flawless and (surprisingly) painless. The one problematic time was because the new machine arrived with bad RAM; although it booted, the new box was for all practical purposes DOA. One warranted replacement later, the migration process worked every bit as well as I'd come to expect. I think the "app-as-folder" convention and the lack of a central registry are the main contributors to the success of these migrations. "Move this list of folders and files from A to B" is a simple, if tedious, task. FWIW, I have NOT performed that migration on any machine that had Parallels or VMWare installed; Adobe installs have been the most complicated thing that I've migrated using this utility. If any readers have used the migration on machines containing software (vmware, parallels, etc) that adds kernel extensions, I would be very interested to read the results.

stuff4ben 16y ago

I love my new job! Getting ready to switch from a slightly used Lenovo W500 to a Core i5 MBP in the next couple of weeks. Developing enterprisey-apps for Cisco may not be as cool as working at Google, but I love what I'm doing and the new toys are great too.

Ixiaus 16y ago

While the refinements of OS X and the Apple Mac hardware have been big sellers for me, it was ultimately, the combination of a beautiful and intuitive GUI coupled with an underlying Unix system. I know Windows has got Cygwin, it just "isn't the same" though. My story began with a $200.00 laptop and GNU/Linux. I spent four days installing and configuring GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) on that poor laptop; I should have been more diligent about checking up on hardware compatibility... The roaches were X.org and the f'ing wireless card. This laptop was $200.00 for a reason. It turns out many of the parts inside of it had chipsets from unheard-of Taiwanese companies (this is were diligence would have saved me time and money); therefore, they were largely unsupported or had nasty hacks to work with it. After four days, I had X.org finally working the way it was supposed to (including the nvidia graphics card binary!) and after wrangling ndiswrapper to the ground, I had a fully functional laptop (shutting the lid didn't sleep it, and X would freak out when I would lift the lid, so not "fully" functional). Life was good for a little while until Ubuntu came out with an update. I figured a system update couldn't be too bad and went for it after backing up all my data. After that update, X.org stopped working, the wireless card stopped working, and none of my previous steps to get either working worked. I decided to give up on that laptop and reasoned this: OS X has a beautiful GUI, Unix underneath, and everything seems to work "just right". I bought a 13" Black MacBook that day. Ever since, I have had 0 problems with it. I'm a heavy user of the command-line and compile a lot of software on it; updates don't break things, and Time Machine can rollback anything (not just data) if something does break. That's good software. Now, I'm not hating on GNU/Linux by any means - this pivotal experience was four years ago and I'm sure a lot has changed since then, not to mention my choice of hardware could have easily moved me in a different direction had I been more fastidious about checking the hardware compatibility lists. From that experience, however, and observing the community as a whole over the last few years, one thing is obvious to me: GNU/Linux isn't meant for the desktop (speaking of everyday users here, not RMS or your sysadmin). OS X is a desktop operating system, Windows is a desktop operating system (I'll never touch windows again, now that I've had Linux and OS X), Haiku (the BeOS fork) is a desktop operating system (for which I have high high hopes). I currently, probably, do fewer things in the GUI than most OS X users; I use the Visor extension for Terminal, I have a fully customized ZSH shell, and I pretty much live inside of full-screen Emacs - but I do love interfacing with OS X. Fan boy? Not quite, my choice is more of a logical and rational one arrived at by much experience and experimentation; if Haiku gets to a reasonably stable stage, I'm sure to switch to that platform more in support of diversity than any irrational emotional attachment.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

etherael 16y ago

a month ago I bought a 27" iMac reasoning that even if the operating system is as bad as my limited experience suggested up front it was still nice hardware and I could always just install Linux on it afterwards. One month onward I find myself liking the OS even less rather than more but have not had time to figure out what I would need to do to install Ubuntu dualboot either and thus when using the machine still find myself frustrated with arbitrary macisms that afflict it. The only part of the system I remain impressed with is the screen. This box cost 2700$ aud. Meanwhile when it came time to get a new notebook I grabbed an Asus n61jq with a faster CPU more memory and a better video card that ran Ubuntu flawlessly with a single xorg tweak for almost exactly half the price of the iMac

thought_alarm 16y ago

OS X won me over in 2005 (in a way that most Linux software never could, though I certainly gave them a generous chance) and it had a profound effect on how I design software. I hadn't realized just how entrenched I had become in Windows mono-culture. After using OS X I was surprised to learn that my ideas of what good software should be were completely stale and complacent.

awa 16y ago

My feelings for Mac has been mixed, I haven't found it much superior to Win 7 (to warrant the apple tax) and there are things which have annoyed me (e.g. different shortcuts for doing the same thing in chrome vs. firefox. Some apps having a full screen mode, some don't.) I agree with the author that Exchange and chrome works(though flash causes it to break often) but these work on Windows too, so these are not things I would want to pay extra for. I haven't found much in the software to pay extra for the Apple experience, if I do buy another Mac it'll probably be due to better hardware than anything else (but I cringe on the thought that I can't upgrade the RAM/hardware myself though the iMac looks really nice on my desk)

darkandbrooding 16y ago
I won't attempt to defend iMac-based hardware upgrades apart from RAM, but memory is actually extremely easy to replace. Just FYI. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3918 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3918

mbateman 16y ago

Apple makes better, prettier, more integrated, etc. laptops. Welcome to 2003.

ZeroGravitas 16y ago
I was there in 2003 and Exchange, Chrome, iWork etc. mentioned in the post either didn't exist or didn't work. Didn't bother me, but there's a whole tranche of people that it did. Personally I've moved on to a tiny Samsung netbook with Ubuntu (a market Apple skipped mostly because it's low margin) and much prefer it.
- illumin8 16y ago
  This - it seems like Apple's work on iOS has paid off with perfect integration with Exchange server. This is a welcome thing that OS/X didn't even have before Snow Leopard.
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    Snow Leopards integration with Exchange is very basic. There is no delegation support, and no ability to access secondary mailboxes which you have permissions on. Hopefully the new Outlook application for Mac which will replace Entourage in the next version of Office will fix these problems later this year.
    - illumin8 16y ago
      I've found similar frustrations with the iPad - it works great for basic email and quick replies, but some of the advanced features like message flagging (I use "flag for follow up" all the time to mark messages I need to work on later) are lacking.
- mbateman 16y ago
  Fair enough. Exchange in particular seems to be a big deal. So maybe this is a nice example of the "halo" effect: people see exchange working on their newfangled iOS devices and realize it will work on Macs, with the added bonus that it's easier to sync those newfangled devices to Macs. This effect also seems to be working on Apple, not just it's customers: selling mobile devices seems to be making Apple more enterprise friendly, so that they work more seriously on things like Exchange support.

gacba 16y ago

Boy meets new Mac. Boy falls in love with Mac. Boy decides to ditch Windows laptop. +1 Fanboy. Where's the story here? Because he's a VC this is news?

thecircusb0y 16y ago
Thats kinda what I was thinking, but I don't want to be mean, and get voted down. It just feels like another mac love story. we get it, macs just work, fantastic for you. There are plenty of OTHER places on the web for the whole mac addict thing. (Like mac addicts).

pornel 16y ago

It's hard not to like laptop with 500GB SSD.

gojomo 16y ago
I'd guess his Windows laptop was similarly tricked-out.
Yaggo 16y ago
Agree. His MacBook Pro configuration costs a whopping $3,899.00.

nevinera 16y ago

I love macs too! Sadly, I like money rather a lot as well, and those two loves conflict strongly.

drivebyacct2 16y ago

Meh, Windows 7 and OS X provide nearly equally usable user interfaces. The new taskbar works fantastically, and looks just as nice as the OS X dockbar. Windows 7 is easy enough to use for the most part, I find nothing harder to configure than it's OS X counter part. I personally like the Apple hardware a lot though. Now if only Linux had a sane DE. I can't stand GNOME or KDE. Gnome is so inconsistent and hard to configure properly. KDE's defaults for everything and standard widgets (Esp like in preference dialogs in applications) is just atrocious.