The very first time I fell in love with a computer, was my brother’s Macintosh. This was way before Microsoft even had Windows 1.0 up and running. It opened my eyes to what the computing experience should be like versus what it was. The concept of a GUI, the usage of this odd little device called “mouse”, the chime as the Mac booted up was all so intuitive to me; so much so, that my brother was concerned with me breaking the computer for the first time. It wasn’t so much that I would spill drinks on it, but I knew how to use the Mac enough to really cause some damage to it, where I would never be able to even navigate my own way through DOS without his guidance.
Even then, I still faded away from Mac in the 90′s. The mid-90′s was a dark period for Apple. Steve Jobs was gone, and Apple stopped innovating on new technology, instead focused heavily on marketing and diluting their own product line by introducing a seemingly endless number of models that catered to no particular segments (well, they were supposed to, just never did a very good job at it). The only memorable about Apple during those periods were the endless informercials I would see on Sundays about their line of Performa, Quadra, Classic… so on & so forth.
After many happy years with Windows (and I do stress, that I was in fact, happy with Windows), I finally made the switch back to Mac. So what prompted me to finally make the switch?…
I never had much “brand loyalty” of any type to begin with. As a personal mantra I have with all of my purchasing decisions in life, I go with what works. Throughout the 90′s, Windows kept on getting better. Despite what Mac zealots may be led to believe by the great Apple marketing machine, Windows 95 was at least on par, if not better than Mac at the time. The subsequent Windows 98 and Windows 2000 releases (we can just try to forget about ME and most versions of NT up to that point.. those were.. *cough*… software I’d rather not traverse) were all heading towards the right direction. Windows XP is really the pinnacle of it all, where Microsoft finally consolidated their codebase, giving backward compatibility & forward progress at the same time. Meanwhile Mac struggled along with System 7, 7.5, 8, and finally the horrible mess that was System 9.
It really wasn’t until Steve Jobs came back, made the decision to completely scrap backward compatibility and ditch MacOS 9, that Apple started to get back on the right track. At least from the software standpoint. PowerPC was a pretty good platform for a while, but the lack of developmental support from Motorola & IBM really allowed PowerPC to fall behind by a fair margin. Forget the talk about how great G3, G4, and G5 was. The fact is, those CPU’s didn’t live up to their performance unless given a very specific situation & specific benchmark that made it look good for the marketing team. Intel and AMD was faster, dollar for dollar. The awesome advancements such as Alvitec was nothing more than glorified MMX and SSE. Good thing those did for our x86 chips, right? (To a point, those features have somewhat became an integrated part of the chip design.. but I’m not an engineer… so I won’t go into it. Ars-technica is great for that type of info)
This year though, I’ve finally hit a “tipping point”, as the scale fell back into Apple’s favor, prompting my switch back to the Mac after nearly 15 years of using Windows exclusively:
- The switch to Intel
This is a huge reason for me to switch over to the Mac. Finally I don’t feel like I’m paying extra $$$ for an inferior CPU. The playing field in terms of hardware advancement, is finally even between PC and Mac. - PC, despite conventional wisdom, aren’t cheaper
Pricing a Mac Pro configuration on Dell’s website, as many have suggested before, will actually give you a more expensive PC than the Mac. An equivalently configured Dell will atually cost more. I think part of the reason that Mac seems more expensive, has to do with their configuration & pricing scheme. You have iMac, which would be cheaper if the monitor isn’t integrated. Mac Mini which is a great entry-level machine, but gamers can’t play games on it. Mac Pro which has great, awesome power, but usually is more than what your typical user would need. If you can sell a system configured like a high-end iMac without the built-in LCD screen, that would be the price “sweet spot” for the typical PC buyer right now. - I can’t just “upgrade” my PC anymore
I used to just upgrade bits and pieces of my PC to keep myself up to date. As computer development sped up rapidly due to competition between AMD and Intel, that just isn’t possible anymore. My last major computer upgrade consisted of an entire motherboard, CPU, memory, hard drive, video card and power supply swap. I’ve literally gutted my entire computer to keep myself “up to date”. The price of keeping up went from just a few pieces of hardware, to basically half of a system. Next time I want to upgrade my CPU, I can guarantee that my motherboard wouldn’t be compatible, and who knows what other parts needs to be retired (my hard drives has already fallen behind the current SATA standard). - When I buy a Mac, I’m buying a PC too
Mac can run Windows, either using a virtual machine via Parallels or dual-boot using Bootcamp. Parallels can be a tiny bit slower (you probably won’t notice unless you’re running benchmarks) and it can’t play games (just yet, they are planning to do that in the future), but since you no longer need to emulate CPU, it runs extremely well and extremely fast. In fact, some users reports Photoshop CS2 being faster in Parallels than MacOS (CS2 is not Universal Binary, so it runs via Rosetta emulation mode on Intel Macs. This may not be true anymore, since MacOS X 10.4.8 brought a lot of speed improvements in Rosetta. Still a remarkable fact though). Bootcamp is literally booting your machine like a PC, no compromise in speed whatsoever. - MacOS X has matured
OS X had several years to refine itself. I remember seeing the very first OS X, it was a resource hog and had a lot of inconsistency throughout its UI and file structures. All these problems were slowly ironed out over the past few years. The GUI is extremely stable and flexible. The file system really screams in comparison to NTFS. While Windows Vista is just catching up to where OS X is today, OS X is already moving forward. Which brings me to the last point… - Windows Vista
Ironically, this was probably the nail in the coffin for me. Windows Vista, despite all its praises compared to Windows XP, simply wasn’t impressive to me. It attempts to do everything that OS X already does, poorly. “Aero Glass” is a disgusting attempt at making an eye-catching GUI while giving us no more functional improvements. Sure, it may look cool the first few times, but does transparency really help me work better, or just make everything more cluttered? Flip3D is a complete joke compared to Expose. There just aren’t enough improvements in Vista to prompt me to invest in “Vista Ultimate”, which invariably will be the version I would want to run if I was still a Windows user. Vista isn’t bad, but it’s just not good enough.
Now, I’ll admit that I miss playing some games in Windows. It’s still frustrating to see the extremely wide variety of games available on Windows as opposed to Mac. I’m just happy that some of the best game developers out there do care about Mac (for example, Blizzard with all of their games). There are several promising developments that will perhaps continue to bring more games to the Mac platform.
Meanwhile, I haven’t been this happy with a computer in years.
