Living on Air: A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac
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Living on Air: A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac
Windows expert Preston Gralla was challenged to work with Apple's MacBook Air for two weeks. Will he ever go back to a PC?
The final verdict
What did I learn after several weeks of living with the Mac?
First off, I had expected there to be a longer learning curve, and had thought that in the long run there wouldn't be much of a difference between the Mac and a PC. After all, an operating system is just an operating system.
To a certain extent that's true. When you use productivity applications themselves, there's not a great deal of difference between using them on a Mac versus using them on a PC. However, when it came to the operating system itself, there's certainly a difference, and a substantial one. Mac OS X is simpler to use and easier to configure, yet has more bells, whistles and "eye candy." And much of that eye candy, such as Exposé, is not just elegantly designed and entertaining, but quite useful as well.
That's not to say that every aspect of the Mac is superior to the PC. Vista's Network and Sharing Center, and especially the Network Map, is an excellent, simple, all-in-one destination for networking that Mac OS X would do well to emulate.
Overall, though, Mac OS X beats Windows. There, I've said it. And lightning hasn't struck me yet.
However, there's no doubt that you often pay extra for a Mac; there really is a Mac tax, even if Microsoft has overstated the amount of that tax. But after living with a Mac, I can understand why people would be willing to pay the tax.
Am I giving up PCs for the Mac? Certainly not. I've got multiple PCs at home, including those that run Windows XP, Windows Vista and a beta of Windows 7. And I've got one that dual-boots into either XP or Linux running Ubuntu. Replacing all those machines with Macs would be prohibitively expensive, and simply not worth the effort.
As for the MacBook Air, for a portable machine, it's perfect in just about every way but one -- its price tag. Still, I've bit the bullet and am buying one, used. This isn't about productivity or getting work done; it's pure machine lust.
Preston Gralla is a contributing editor to Computerworld.com and the author of more than 35 books, including How the Internet Works (Que, 2006).
Living on Air: A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac
Windows expert Preston Gralla was challenged to work with Apple's MacBook Air for two weeks. Will he ever go back to a PC?
The final verdict
What did I learn after several weeks of living with the Mac?
First off, I had expected there to be a longer learning curve, and had thought that in the long run there wouldn't be much of a difference between the Mac and a PC. After all, an operating system is just an operating system.
To a certain extent that's true. When you use productivity applications themselves, there's not a great deal of difference between using them on a Mac versus using them on a PC. However, when it came to the operating system itself, there's certainly a difference, and a substantial one. Mac OS X is simpler to use and easier to configure, yet has more bells, whistles and "eye candy." And much of that eye candy, such as Exposé, is not just elegantly designed and entertaining, but quite useful as well.
That's not to say that every aspect of the Mac is superior to the PC. Vista's Network and Sharing Center, and especially the Network Map, is an excellent, simple, all-in-one destination for networking that Mac OS X would do well to emulate.
Overall, though, Mac OS X beats Windows. There, I've said it. And lightning hasn't struck me yet.
However, there's no doubt that you often pay extra for a Mac; there really is a Mac tax, even if Microsoft has overstated the amount of that tax. But after living with a Mac, I can understand why people would be willing to pay the tax.
Am I giving up PCs for the Mac? Certainly not. I've got multiple PCs at home, including those that run Windows XP, Windows Vista and a beta of Windows 7. And I've got one that dual-boots into either XP or Linux running Ubuntu. Replacing all those machines with Macs would be prohibitively expensive, and simply not worth the effort.
As for the MacBook Air, for a portable machine, it's perfect in just about every way but one -- its price tag. Still, I've bit the bullet and am buying one, used. This isn't about productivity or getting work done; it's pure machine lust.
Preston Gralla is a contributing editor to Computerworld.com and the author of more than 35 books, including How the Internet Works (Que, 2006).