Quite frankly, I never expected this will ever come true, especially so soon after the release of Kindle 2. At this point, Kindle 2 is just barely hot off the press, shipping to those early adopters, and already it’s being replaced by a software platform strategy. You have to wonder about Amazon’s claim of Kindle success. For as long as Amazon has tauted Kindle being a hot selling, successful consumer electronic product, the company has been more than reluctant to release any sort of sales figure. During the Kindle shortage throughout the holiday season, Amazon would not divulge any production schedule or data.

Every consumer product company, regardless of industry, understands the important in marketings its own success. McDonald’s with their millions of burgers served, Pepsi with their “4 out of 5 people prefers the taste of Pepsi over Coke”, Apple with their millions of iPhones shipped. Publishing these numbers breeds consumer confidence, and leads to increasing momentum for the popularity of your product. So why isn’t Amazon more forthcoming? Is Kindle really as much of a success as Amazon want the outside world to believe?

Kindle on iPhone's User Interface

To be fair, although Kindle for iPhone is a free app, iPhone itself is a rather expensive device. If you were to compare them purely by the book reading experience, I’m sure more than a few people will prefer the experience of the Kindle hardware rather than just the software alone.

• The e-paper display has a much longer battery life, you don’t have to worry about running out of juice in middle of reading.
• The display is larger and more comfortable than iPhone.
• Backlit LCD screen is more tiring on your eyes over time.

However, iPhone does so much more than the Kindle: You can check email, browse the web, watch videos, download apps, and of course, make phone calls. On top of all that, iPhone actually starts at a lower price range for the base model than Kindle 2. Sure, you have to factor in phone bills as part of that cost of ownership, but those are phone bills that you would probably be paying regardless if you were using the iPhone or any other smartphone/cellular phone devices. From that point of view, Kindle 2 becomes an “unnecessary cost” while iPhone is just another piece of existing cost (cellphones in general) that people can’t live without.

So why would Amazon do this to themselves?

When the Kindle was first released, a lot of people thought that Amazon was aiming to create the same vertical market that Apple had with iPod and iTunes Music Store. The reason Apple was so successful with their strategy, is that they were able to dominate in all fronts of their vertical integration: Hardware, software and content. If Apple had given up that exclusivity at any point and allowed other devices to interact with their software and content, chances are iPod would not be as dominant as they are today.

For Apple, they realized that although content is the “reason” for consumers to purchase iPods, it is the iPod, not the content, that is the primary source of income for Apple. It is increasingly apparent that Amazon’s strategy is very different, they’re in the business of selling content, not hardware. The act of making Kindle available as a software platform on other devices, also makes their own hardware less appealing. It’s not just the iPhone. What if I can get Kindle on my desktop computer, my laptop computer? If you really look at the pricing structure of the Kindle hardware, I can get a Netbook for about or less than the cost of Kindle 2, and I have a fully functional computing device with a full color screen.

Clearly, this is the first step for Amazon to step away from the hardware business. No one knows exactly how much Amazon is paying to subsidize for the cost of not only the hardware itself, but also the wireless service that goes along with the Kindle hardware. If Kindle becomes nothing more than just a software platform, then it’s not much different than MobiPocket, which has been selling eBooks on mobile devices since the year 2000, whom Amazon had also acquired.

The problem with losing this competitive edge, is that without a hardware platform to tie yourself into, you lose the distinction against any upstart that can take over with better value propositions and tools. Perhaps Amazon should’ve learned the lesson from their own MP3 store, which were granted DRM-free music licenses a year before iTunes Music Store. Despite the fact that Amazon had technical advantages with better music file format (higher bitrate and DRM-free), cheaper pricing, they still couldn’t topple iTMS, simply because the synergy of that hardware+software+content platform is too strong to overcome. Amazon MP3 store ended up doing nothing to thwart iTMS sales, although it did manage to pick up and expand its own fan base.

Without the Kindle hardware, Kindle books are just any eBook. If I can get the same eBook that’s better looking or cheaper from any other third party publisher with the same content, I will. Amazon still has the force of being the 500lb. gorilla in the world of book selling, but it just made itself a lot more vunerable if eBook is truly to be the future.

So I was a little disappointed when NBC decided to have a bit spat with iTunes, and decided to pull all of their shows off of iTunes by the end of the year. What really gets to me, is how senseless the arguments the media companies are raising against Apple. This doesn’t pertain to just NBC, but all media companies dealing with iTunes as a whole.

Think back to when Universal was negotiating with Apple for their new music agreement. Their argument was that they’re not making enough money from iTunes Music Store, they want more control over pricing. Similar arguments has been brought up over the years with Apple multiple times, and they’re all along the lines of more control over DRM, more control over pricing, more profit for the record labels. Time and time again they insist that they can’t make enough money from iTunes Music Store alone.

Yet, look what happened these past few months. EMI started selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes, and doesn’t seem to be hurt by it as much as bolstered by it. All the other studios started offering completely DRM-free tracks on Amazon MP3 that sold for as little as $0.89 per track, depending on albums (although the misconception is all tracks are available at $0.89, they are not. Most out-of-print album tracks are $0.99, similar to how such albums costs more than new releases at record stores). They have agreed to sell less restrictive & less expensive music on Amazon, meanwhile telling Apple this is precisely what they cannot ever afford to do.

Now with this NBC deal, they’re complaining about revenue, about not making enough money. Same arguments as the record labels had with iTunes. At the same time, they’re going to be bringing out their own video service that allows you to watch entire shows for free (albeit with advertisements) and even embed videos on other sites in a very web 2.0-friendly fashion. So now they’re just serving up bandwidth and going back to relying on advertisement-based revenue models. Do they really make that much more money from webcasts compared to selling the shows? I’m sure the studios makes a huge amount of money from DVD sales of TV shows. Meanwhile iTunes’ sheer volume may not be as much as DVD sales now, it is a developing market that will probably grow bigger over time as we steer away from solid-state mediums for media delivery.

Furthermore, NBC’s little tirade about how much they’ve helped the iPod, and how they should get a share of that iPod sales revenue, is utterly ridiculous. Has RCA, Sony, Sharp and other TV manufacturers been sending part of their revenue to television stations? Obviously TV as a delivery medium wouldn’t work without the TV stations. So why isn’t NBC charging TV makers a fee for delivering their shows to millions of homes everyday?

We’ll see how this whole thing plays out. In the end, AmazonMP3 might take over iTunes Music Store, but that’s only because iTMS was there to pave the way first. Maybe Hulu.com will succeed, or maybe it’ll be a massive failure. Whatever happens, the end result probably wouldn’t impact iPod sales a slight bit. After all, no one’s stopped buying TV’s because NBC doesn’t have any interesting shows on Wednesday nights, right?

Here I think of all the announcements:

1. iPod Shuffle – Practically nothing new and worth mentioning at all.
2. iPod Nano – It’s FAT. I really don’t like the new look. Although I bet once I’ve held on in person, I’d be willing to put up with the new form factor. It is even slimmer and overall smaller than the current Nanos. The proportion of the click wheel to the width of the device is just… ugly. I wish they could’ve worked a little harder and done something else. I was really hoping for an iPod Nano-Touch type of device here. It’s still not a bad iPod, just underwhelming.
3. iPod Classic – Same ol’ same ol’ with bigger hard drive. I do find it funny that the iPod Classic’s hard drive is bigger than some of my friend’s computer hard drive. Nothing new, nothing exciting.
4. iPod Touch – Great device, but it’s not really that fresh since it’s just a stripped down iPhone. Like I said, I rather wished they would integrate Nano + Touch into some device that’s in between.

I’m sure Apple will still sell a ton of them, because no other MP3 player in the market has near the media dominance. The surprise to me was the $200 price drop on the iPhone. I promptly went out and got one, 2-year contract be damned. At $399 it’s a very reasonably priced PDA phone, in fact, one of the most feature-rich and well priced phone you can get. I guess I’ll put up with AT&T for another 2 years at least.

Wireless iTunes Music Store… In a way it’s a long time coming, but I wonder how many times I’ll be wondering around in middle of nowhere just wanting to buy a new song?

Although I wouldn’t go so far as saying everything was “crappy”… I wasn’t extremely impressed either.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Enjoy!

Finally, on the last day of May, iTunes has been updated to version 7.2 along with the arrival of “iTunes Plus”. DRM-less, 256kbps AAC files at last. I was excited enough to hop on right away and purchase 2 albums that has been sitting in my Amazon shopping cart for months (in their CD form, no less).

I’ve always been a very discerning audiophile, which only recently finally succumbed to the fact that keeping all of my music in Apple Lossless is really just a waste of hard drive space for a small (although still perceivable) quality gain. I have over thousands of dollars invested in pretty good audio equipments, most of which I no longer listen to on even a monthly basis anymore.

My Super Audio CD player is completely useless, as the format has died a painful and slow death. Now it is nothing more than a glorified CD changer that I never, ever bother to change. I have racks of CD’s that I don’t really want to deal with on my next move, only half of which has been ripped into MP3′s.

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many hours of entertainment I can relegate to my schedule per day, and most of those times are split in between games, TV, and other activities outside of the house. My interaction with music now are limited to my commute and a few minutes at work when I don’t have to worry about the next meeting. I am now content with 256kbps

Personally, I think the delay doesn’t really mean much. As much as I love to see a new OS from Apple, there’s nothing obviously wrong and needs to be improved in MacOS X now. Unless Leopard has some insane, awesome unknown trick up its sleeve, there aren’t any feature that I have to have now. There certainly weren’t any new features introduced by Vista that makes me say, “I wish MacOS had this…”

Getting iPhone out on-time, and without bugs is probably the most important issue to Apple’s continued success at the moment. A bad iPhone launch could set back years of good will that Apple has built up. It’s funny how much it takes to rebuild a company (dating back to Steve Job’s return and the cute multi-color iMacs), and how easy it is to destroy it and see it crumple (the entire 1990′s for Apple).

The iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices—such as an iPod and a phone—and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton—who knew a thing or two about apples—they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It’s a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.

Read the whole article here.

Well, I hope CES learned their lesson and never do this again. Apple just blew everyone away with the iPhone, coverages are all over the web, so I won’t repeat any of them here. I’ll just provide a few useful links to read up on all the jazz:

News.com
Engadget
Gizmodo

Of course, not the least:

Apple

Despite month of speculations, including many accurate ones, Apple *still* managed to just BLOW EVERYONE AWAY. Even with all the expectations and hype, they outdone all of them. No one cares about anything that’s going on at CES now, we’re all just counting our bills and waiting ’til June 2007.

As much as I adore Paul Thurrot (and that’s no sarcasm, I really do admire how much time & effort he put into giving us accurate & detailed information), I can’t help but note the enthusiasm and appreciation he has towards one of the “most important Windows release in years.” I mean, if you only release one major OS revision ever fives years, are there anything less important? However the review eschews every possible comparison to other existing operating system and turns a blind eye towards the alternatives. There’s much to be said about judging an OS release on its own merit, but the whole mega-multi-part review just reminds me of how much Windows Vista is just playing catch-up.

The most apparent example of this, is the 3d-accelerated UI of Vista. The Aero/Glass (I’m still not sure exactly how it’s branded, Aero Glass, Glass Aero? Aero, then Glass? *shrug*) interface in itself is close to being unusable. For those of you who has not seen it yet, there are basically translucent UI element all throughout the operating system. The windows in background are blurred through the translucent elements, thus giving you the frosted “glass” effect for which the UI is named after. Problem is, having multiple windows stacked this way causes visual confusion and provides no improvement to productivity. Transparency in Windows has been done before via third party addons, although not accelerated by hardware, and from an usability stand point has never worked well.

So if the interface is so bad, why did Microsoft put it in? It’s the same reason why people mod their computer cases, cut out windows on the side and put in a bunch of neon lights. Anyone who thinks a bunch of tied down cables and liquid cooling tubes lit by a dozen LED and neon light is “cool” clearly has no appreciation for aesthetics and design. At some point Microsoft thought that’s the user base that they had to impress.

Flip3D is equally atrocious as a task-switcher. It’s Microsoft’s attempt to make something that resembles Expose, without just copying it completely. Expose on the Mac instantly zooms out all of the windows you have open, allowing you to look through the windows and find the application that you are working with. Flip3D, places the windows at a diagonal view that detracts from readability. Furthermore, it stacks the windows up, so a single view of all your open windows isn’t really possible. At the end of the day, it is no more effective the good ol’ alt+tab. What I found most offensive, is that for all the 3d accelerated power, the windows aren’t even anti-aliased, giving you an ugly jagged edge as it is repositioned into an isometric/diagonal viewing angle.

Interface aside, the underlying security improvements of Windows is nothing more than just catching up to Unix, the underpinning of MacOS X. The one thing that would’ve taken Vista past OS X, instead of just playing catch up, was the ambitious database-driven file system. So ambitious in fact, that WinFS was axed years before the final development cycle. Who knows when we’ll get WinFS? Another five years? Would WinFS still be relevant?

What about the bundled software? Vista finally has a built-in Calendar without people having to shell out money for their own PIM or Outlook. It also now has separate applications that handles photos and other media, instead of dealing with those media organization strictly from Explorer (not IE, but Windows Explorer) as it was in Windows XP. Basically, Microsoft just copied iCal, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. Way to go Microsoft.

The last item that I’ve found extremely disappointing, is that Windows Vista is supposed to be the version of Windows that finally allows us to take advantage of the 64-bit processor now found in most PC’s. It seems silly that all of our AMD Athlon and Intel Core chips has had 64-bit extension for more than a year now, and still yet to be able to take full advantage of it. However, Vista 32-bit and 64-bit are actually different installs. So if you install 32-bit Vista, you’ll have to reinstall completely if you want to use 64-bit. If you install 64-bit today, you’ll probably find software or device driver conflicts as they weren’t written for the 64-bit Vista.

MacOS X, btw, is 64-bit (even though I think few apps are written to take advantage of that yet), and has been for almost an entire year now. No separate installs, no separate drivers. It just works.

Vista will do just fine, because people with PC will eventually upgrade, new PC’s will ship with it, corporations will adopt. However, it is nevertheless a disappointing and underwhelming release. Anyone who sees through that will heavily consider switching to a Mac, just as I have.

There are a lot of fear in switching to a new platform. Although going from Windows to Mac really isn’t that hard, a bit of a learning curve is involved in acclimation to the slight differences in their UI. Honestly, Windows has always emulated Mac, and then Mac emulated some parts of Window, it’s really not that hard to get accustomed. What is a bigger problem though, is getting replacement software for what you’re used to in Windows.

Here’s the good news, there is a plethora of budget to free Mac software that can probably cover everything you do in Windows, and in many cases, do it even better.

Mail, Address & Calendar
Most people has seen plenty of iTunes, heard about iMovie and iDVD in the barrage of Apple TV ads. I’m surprised at how many people who don’t know about the other very useful, and powerful software that Mac comes with.

Mail (sometimes called Mail.app to not confuse it with… well, mail) is the default email program shipped with Mac. It does look extremely simple and straight forward at first, but it does have a good amount of hidden power under its UI. The rules are extremely robust and easy to configure. It comes with a very decent built-in junkmail filter. What impressed me the most, is one silly little feature (as with everything in life, it’s the little details that makes a huge difference): Mail automatically sorts your email into separate inboxes by account, along with a top level inbox. So you can view each individual account or all your email at once. I used to spend minutes in Outlook creating rules to sort my email into different boxes by account, now that’s all done automatically as soon as I create an account. Like I said, little thing that counts.

Mail doesn’t have its own contact list, instead it is integrated with Address Book (sometimes I really wish they would come up with some awesome superhero-sounding names for these applications). This idea of having many smaller application that does one particular task well, and also allows other application to integrate & access that data seamlessly, is one you’ll find across many Mac applications (even third party apps does a great job at doing this). For example, adding a birthday to my friend in Address Book, automatically creates an appointment entry in iCal. Similarly, any email request for appointment that comes through Mail, is also added to iCal automatically.

Between Mail, Address Book, and iCal, I’ve found absolutely no reason to use any other PIM software. If you’re really into Microsoft Outlook, and just can’t abandone its all-in-one behemoth-like philosophy, then you can still get Microsoft Entourage. Of course, you’d have to pay Microsoft for that one.

Web Browsers
MacOS comes with Safari, but I’m really not too hot on Safari. It’s a decent browser, but the lack of support & worries over the adaptation of standards (at least, the interpreted web standards) just doesn’t float my boat. Instead, I always fall back on Firefox, just as I did with my PC. The number of available extensions, open source community development still makes Firefox the best browser on both Mac & Windows.

There is another viable option. OmniWeb is also based on WebKit, like Safari, but it offers some additional functionality that is at least somewhat intriguing. You may find it to your likings, but you do have to pay for OmniWeb.

Other Internet Utilities
For FTP I use CyberDuck, which is another one of those great, free and open-source application. I use Speed Download to manage my downloads, it’s faster than Firefox’s built-in downloader by a huge margin, and at $25, it’s not an expensive purchase. Shrook is one of the best RSS reader out there, and again, available for free. The only downside to Shrook is the UI heavily depends on having a wide-screen. Given most default Mac configuration these days, that’s not much of a problem.

Productivity
I don’t use Microsoft Office anymore. I can’t help but shake the feeling that the Mac development team at Microsoft is all huddled up in this little corner of one building, with the rest of the employees walking by them pretending they don’t exist. They do turn out excellent software at times, but it’s always short on a few features here and there, not enough resource for development… etc.. etc… Just look at the crippled MSN Messenger for Mac.

So, Microsoft Office is not universal binary and have no plans to be in its current iteration. There are no clear plans of what’s going to happen after Office 2007 comes out for PC. As mentioned in my previous post, there are going to file incompatibility problem between Mac version of Office and Office 2007.

Instead, I’ve switched over to NeoOffice, the open-source alternative based on OpenOffice. The performance of NeoOffice isn’t the best, but it gets most of what I need out of an office suite for no cost at all.

Another great productivity software is OmniGraffle, by the same people that makes OmniWeb. This is one robust application that allows you to create flowcharts that are highly functional, and much better looking than Visio.

Multimedia
As great as iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie can be, at times they still can’t do everything you want them to do. For example, iTunes is a great music player and manager, but it doesn’t want to do anything outside of its library-based UI, and it doesn’t offer a convient way of converting files. I store all my music in Apple Lossless, but some of my friends don’t want files in that format (they’re gigantic). Converting file format in iTunes can be done, but it’s pretty awkward to create a second copy of the same songs in a different format, especially since it’s only for my friends, not me. This is where I’ve found Switch Plus to be a great application. It can basically convert anything that QuickTime can play (thus, all the formats, other than protected formats, from iTunes) into a different music file format.

I also download a lot of manga, which is a pain to import into iPhoto & view, because they’re not really the same as family vacation photos. Instead, I use another freeware application called FFView, which has built-in capability to view into Zip, Rar, and a few other compressed file archives without having to expand the files. It’s the best way to keep my manga organized and kept away from my vacation photos.

Lastly, if you do in fact, have vacation photos that you want to edit, but iPhoto just doesn’t quite do it for you… try out Gimp. It’s a long-standing open-source image editing software that aimed to compete against Photoshop (but never quite gets there). It’s been around Unix/Linux for ages, and the MacOS is just as good.

For movies, you have to get Flip4Mac and VLC. The combination of these two software will allow you to view most of the DivX, ogm, mkv, wmv, and various other movie files you’ll find on the net.

System Utilities
These software utilities are hard to categorize, but they are all what I would consider must-haves.

SteerMouse – an almost-universal mouse software that can configure almost any of the popular mouse on the market. Often giving you much more flexibility than the commercial driver of the mouse. It adds more feature to Apple’s own Might Mouse, and even beats the Logitech driver for my MX1000 hands down.

Zooom – this gives you the ability to resize and move windows without having to grab onto the title bar and the corner. Hold down a customized function key anywhere within your current window, and you can resize & move the window at ease. It may sound trivial at first, but once you get used to it, you’ll never want to move your mouse to the corner of the window just to resize it.

Email Backup Pro & ChronoSync – These two applications makes backing up your email & other files a breeze. I have Email Backup Pro scheduled to backup all my mailbox on a nightly basis, and ChronoSync setup to synchronize my documents folder. I don’t know if TimeMachine , when OS X 10.5 comes out, will make either of these software obsolete. I can still use ChronoSync to synchronize my files between work & home computer.

As you can see, there are plenty of softwares out there for the Mac, and chances are if you just took a bit of time, did a little bit of research, you’ll find software that allows you to do everything that you could’ve done with your Windows machine. Most of the time, even better.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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…
6. 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.