Granted, I don’t use a whole lot of Firefox addons, but there is one addon I couldn’t live without: The bookmarking addon from del.icio.us. Since I work on multiple computers at work and home, del.ici.ous has became a valuable tool to keep all of my bookmark in one place. It’s also much more flexible than Google Bookmarks.

Now there is a beta version of the del.icio.us addon for Firefox 3, available here:

delicious blog – Firefox 3, del.icio.us, and you

Just follow the link and install the new version of the addon, so far it’s been working great. With the availability of this addon, my switch over to Firefox 3 is complete.

As I was listening to Windows Weekly podcast this morning, I found out that Leo Laporte had gotten a new sponsor (for at least this episode) that makes a software called “Engage”. It offers a bit of the same functionality as QuickSilver for those envious Windows users. Although most likely, Windows users never knew such an approach to program launcher existed, but Mac users dual-booting or virtualizing Windows on their machine is probably incredibly frustrated every time they had to reach into that Start Menu. It is still far less powerful than QuickSilver in terms of extensibility and integration via plugins into other programs, but at least it’s better than the bare minimum Start Menu that Windows comes with.

Engage – the automatic start menu organizer

“Show Us The Code” is pushing for Steve Ballmer to show the open source world exactly what part of Microsoft’s source code is being used in Linux:

Your repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

Publicly pledge your support for Microsoft showing the public the code within Linux that violates their intellectual property by May 1st, 2007.

So far, the support seems to be gathering steam. Let’s hope this one doesn’t fizzle out like previous movements.

Vista Month: Welcome To The DRM?

It’s a good, short & concise post that pretty much summarizes all the ideas behind Vista’s new content protection scheme without going into too much details. Although the post itself is relative old news by now (not to say that my post isn’t), the comments following the post is most entertaining.

There are quite a few people who swear they’ll never use Vista. Which will most likely be challenged when they purchase their next machine which will inevitably ship with Vista preinstalled. A few said they would rather switch to Linux, and even fewer said they will switch to MacOS. Completely understandable, since you can get Linux distributions for free, and you would have to pay for a new machine to get MacOS.

The number of people who are willing to defend Microsoft on this point is also surprising. While a few valid counter arguments has been made, including that most of these security features are turned on/off depending on the policy of the content provider; the fact remains that the studio has absolute, revocable control over what we paid for.

As history has shown us, it’s really hard to disable or extend pre-existing devices of any sort. For example, add-on drives to enable extra functions in consoles has never really panned out (even XBox 360′s HD-DVD drive is nothing more than offering an value add to watch HD-DVD content. No games will ever come out in that format). Destroying backward compatibility, as some early CD-DRM methods has proven, is also nearly impossible. With all the non-compliant stand-alone HD players out there, it’s hard to say if the studios will ever enforce complete security profiles on HD content.

However, this isn’t about the practical application of such ideals, but the fact that our rights to some degree has been completely taken away by these implementation of technology. If we allow them to get away with it this round, they will make sure it was implemented the “right way” the next time around. That’s an argument that everyone seems to be missing.

Part of me didn’t believe that even Microsoft would go as far as implementing a content protection system that would come at a such detriment to the consumer. So I waited for weeks to see if Microsoft had any sort of public statement and rebuttal against it. Microsoft did eventually comment on the content protection behind Vista, and really couldn’t say much more other than admitting, and putting a good spin on what has been done.

Short blurb about AACS
To understand Windows Vista content protection, we have to first understand the difference between DVD, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Our good ol’ DVD format was made during the adolescence of the digital content era. At the time the movie studios were promised that this complex encryption algorithm would never be cracked. As it turns out, CSS (the method of encryption used on DVD) wasn’t as impervious as we thought. If I recall correctly, the key to decrypting CSS was discovered in one of the software that plays back DVD on the PC. Since there’s no way to revoke that key once discovered, CSS encryption was hence cracked forever.

Thus, with HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the studios sought out a much more effective method of protecting their content. What they arrived at is what’s known as AACS (Advanced Access Content System). The key differences between AACS and CSS are:

• AACS seems to have a more modern public/private key encryption system, where there are many more keys assigned than there are in CSS encryption. The granularity of key distribution is unknown. Keys can be handed out on a per-player or per-model number basis, or perhaps even a per-company basis. This is unknown.What is for sure, is that there is a very complex & established backend that manages the distribution & licensing of all these keys.
• AACS uses a revocable broadcast system, where the content providers can revoke keys that has been hacked & distributed illegally. So if they realize a certain key has been compromised, they could distribute future content where they no longer will play and decrypt by using that pirated key.
• Manufacturers of players, either software or hardware based, has to pay licensing fee to AACS in order to use the keys. If a certain manufacturer say, goes out of business and then fails to pay the licensing fee, there are no guarantee that your player from that said manufacturer will continue to function. They could revoke the key and you would essentially be stuck with a brick (or useless bytes on your hard drive, if it’s a software player).
• AACS is also “policy-based”. Meaning that each Blu-ray and HD-DVD has a list of configurable policy to act with the hardware/software system that it is playing on. The content provider can choose to enable & disable certain features. For example, a lot of first-generation players shipped with component output which does not support HDCP (the end-to-end encryption from your player to your TV set), and a lot of current content does not have the policy to disable or degrade playback at the lack of HDCP. However content providers can choose to enable this feature in the future and once again, render your current hardware/software potentially useless.

How doe this affect Windows Vista?
Microsoft has an obvious strategy on making Windows Vista the next “media center” for every home, which probably also led to the decision for them to comply with just about everything that content providers wanted, even above and beyond the normal amount of compliance that is expected from a hardware manufacturer of traditional players.

AACS on its own is much more resource intensive; which explains why very early first generation Blu-ray and HD-DVD players can take as long as a minute to just “load” the disc. Of course that has improved with better & cheaper processors in the players, and won’t be much of an issue on your PC. Other than this resource being taken up by decryption, there are still other issues.

Like the aforementioned flexible policy with AACS, Windows Vista is also designed to “degrade” video & sound playback quality if the policy of the content calls for it. Of course all players has to deal with this, but PC users has the worst of it, because there’s a severe lack of completely compliant hardware available. To have complete compliance with AACS, you need to have HDCP, the end-to-end data encryption protection from the disc all the way to your monitor/speakers. There are very few hardware available that has HDCP compliance. There are very few HDCP compliant video cards, I’m not aware of any HDCP compliant sound card at all (which means you can’t get a digital output, only analog), and there are next to none HDCP compliant computer monitor on the market.

Furthermore, complete HDCP compliance requires part of the video/sound driver to become a “black box”. Obviously if the driver source code is available completely, HDCP would be easily hacked or bypassed by some method. So those users who chooses to run alternative operating systems, such as Linux, may be completely out of luck when it comes to HD content on their computer. There would be no open-source driver development to support HDCP components.

However, like I said earlier, most content available now do not have the entire set of compliance rules enabled, simply because there are still plenty of HD components on the market that doesn’t have compliance, and will *never* be compliant. It’s hard to say whether the content provider will eventually enable these features, and essentially shut out all first generation HD adopters (players & TV without HDCP support are all going to be obsolete if they choose to do so). It remains a fact that they are the ones in control, the consumers are not.

Other than HDCP compliance checks, Microsoft also implemented a “tilt-bit”. This is where they go much further to ensure content provider’s happiness than even the stand-alone players. A “tilt-bit” is a term derived from pinball machines, where there’s a detection that if you tilt the machine too much, the machine would consider that you were cheating & stop your ability to continue play. There is a constant system check that runs in the background every 30ms (milliseconds) when you are playing HD content. It checks against all the drivers in the system, all the processes, to make sure that nothing “weird” is going on. Nothing out of “expectation” is going on.

The reality is that computers are rather fickle machines. When you have millions of microscopic circuits on a tiny little chip smaller than your nails, there are a lot of errors that happens on a very small scale at all times. Computer chip do deteriorate over time as well, resulting very small breakdowns in circuits. Most people don’t realize that their computer is very much like their car, where “wear & tear” over time eventually degrades performance and kills a computer (which answers a lot of the questions like, “Why did my computer break down? I’ve only had it for 5 years and only ran one software on it!”). A “tilt-bit” check essentially catches errors similar to what your computer will naturally produce, and then decides what is deemed “appropriate” and what might be “hostile” and then restarts your graphic subsystem if it detects any potentially “harmful” behavior.

This is done to ensure that there isn’t any memory resident hack that’s capturing the decrypted output somehow. It’s also a very wide-area check for any potential hack of any sort that the system just can’t even predict or even know about. It’s like catching brim shrimps with a fishnet.

Lastly, there is a 128-bit encryption for all data sent through the PCI bus to your video card during playback, to ensure that no one can use any sort of a hardware snoop to capture unencrypted data going from the disc to your video card. HD content already takes up much higher bandwidth than DVD, now imagine having to encrypt/decrypt that content over PCI bus in real time. That’s an incredible amount of resource being eaten up for no reason other to service the content providers.

Will other OS’s follow suit?
This kind of insanely taxing implementations of content protection, is what I believe to be the reason that we have yet to see any sort of next-gen content announcement from Apple.

As much as people criticize Apple’s FairPlay DRM for being a closed & proprietary system, people also forget how much Apple fought to reach the compromise that became FairPlay. FairPlay came at a time where record companies weren’t happy about distributing digital content, and even those who did, did not want to license more than one device at a time. They wanted to charge people money for every device that their music played on. Apple fought back, got the contract so people can play their music on up to 5 devices, and are able to disable licensing on devices that they no longer use.

Even before the iTunes Music Store (I’m also surprised at how many people forgot that iTunes existed without the music store at first, and the first iPods did not have downloadable content; it was just a MP3 player), iPod implemented a really screwy one-direction music download to the device, where the song names would be completely scrambled & referenced by a XML file to provide a “soft-protection”. This was part of the design that convinced the music industry that Apple were at least somewhat reasonable to work with. Apple didn’t do these things for no reason at all, they did it so they can negotiate some sort of a compromise that could appease both content provider and the consumers.

Microsoft had made absolutely no attempt at negotiating for a compromise of any sort. Even with their Zune player, they agreed to “pay” music labels for each Zune they sold, even if none of that label’s music would ever make it onto a Zune. Microsoft has certainly made a terrible example of how to deliver content protection to their consumer, and I hope other companies will not follow in their footsteps.

Although this response could be universally applied to all software, it is hilariously funny that the president of Romania would say this right in front of Bill Gates… and basically thank him for the one issue he hates the most.

1. You’re only being compared to the same product of last generation.
This type of comparative review where you’re evaluated mostly against the last generation, perhaps even last generation of your own product, can only happen under two situations. One, if you’re the market leader and there are nothing else to compare to. Or two, you are only impressive when compared against last generation or your previous self. If you’re not in situation one, you’re in trouble.

2. Even major publications that are generally very mutual and stays away from making strong statements and opinions are not giving you a positive, perhaps even just mutual review.
This would be CNET…

It’s very clear in CNET’s review of Windows Vista Ultimate, they are not impressed by how much Windows Vista had to offer after years of development, and the only comparison that would shine light on Vista’s major facelift, would be against its former brethen.

Snippets like this cannot be what Microsoft has planned for five+ years:

Windows Vista is not the Apple Mac OS X 10.4 killer one hoped for (or feared).

Perhaps we’re spoiled, but after more than five years of development, there’s a definite “Is that all?” feeling about Windows Vista. Like cramming an info-dump into a book report the night before it’s due, there certainly are a lot of individual features within the operating system, but the real value lies in their execution–how the user experiences (or doesn’t experience) these–and like the info-dump, we came away shaking our heads, disappointed. Compared with Mac OS X 10.4, Windows Vista feels clunky and not very intuitive, almost as though it’s still based on DOS (or at least the internal logic that made up DOS).

But is Windows Vista a bad operating system? No. It’s just a disappointment for PC users who hoped that Microsoft would deliver something truly exciting to finally leapfrog ahead of Apple. They failed.

Of course, CNET is still putting a positive spin on this being just Vista 1.0, and Microsoft will publish service packs in the future to improve the user experience. Although there are absolutely no historical example of that Microsoft, who up until this point used Service Packs primarily to fix bugs and address security issues.

Even then, they did not recommend current XP users to jump on the Vista bandwagon.

Windows Vista is essentially warmed-over Windows XP. If you’re currently happy with Windows XP SP2, we see no compelling reason to upgrade. On the other hand, if you need a new computer right now, Windows Vista is stable enough for everyday use.

The saddest truth about all this though, is that eventually all users will be running Vista, because it’ll be on their computer when they buy it. Chances are it’ll be the cheap crappy version of Vista anyway, but it’ll be Vista nevertheless. Microsoft will still make plenty of money just by the inertia of the computing masses, with a mediocre OS that did nothing to take us forward. At least Windows users can finally say they have a 3D accelerated UI as well, albeit an ugly looking one (insert your “PC case with plexi window + neon light” versus Mac Pro design analogy here).

From The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
MIT writer says Vista drove her to Mac

And the original article here:
Uninspiring Vista

Yay! I’m not alone! We should start a whole new subculture of “users driven to Mac by Vista” under the broader big-brother branch of the Mac culture.

Vista Security Flaws Uncovered

That, in combination with how hackers already found a way to fool Vista into a permanent 30-day trial. Does not bode well for Microsoft’s PR. Of course, all operating system has its share of security flaws, MacOS X has plenty as well. Just that Microsoft is always under more scrutiny than anyone else. It’s the price you pay for being a dominant, yet also hated company at the same time.

I just spent half a day of work fixing Windows on my work computer, which Windows Update broke. Apparently, somewhere along the line, the automatic update got some corrupted install files. Every time I started up my computer, it attempts to run itself, then crashes svchost.exe with some memory error.

If you looked into your task manager, you’ll probably see several entries by svchost.exe. This is a process that Windows uses to execute DLL’s, thus an integral process of the system that just can’t be allowed to fail by any extent. After my svchost.exe took a dump (and not all of them, just one of the many processes), my XP-styled UI disappeared, reverting back to “classic style”. I couldn’t run certain applications, Internet Explorer hung & crashed, and I could not access any networked drives.

The solution was, to turn off automatic Windows Update completely. Reboot the computer so it no longer tries to run the Windows Update process. Then manually go to the Windows Update site to get my updates. After wasting a few hours figuring out what’s going on, and fixing it… now my computer is up and running again. Still, isn’t this the type of thing that should *never* happen with an automatic update process? Now I’m leaving my automatic update off permanently to prevent any future occurrences of this issue.

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.

IE 7 optimized for Google

I’m conflicted, cheer or jeer?

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.