Have I told you guys lately how much I love my Mac? (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

I gotta be sounding like a broken record, and I'm certain some
of you could care less that I'm gushing in this forum like a girl
seeing her first Davey Jones concert (bad 70's joke), but MAN
OH MAN do I think Macintosh is the best thing that has ever
happened to computers.

You guys know the story. I had a $4K Velocity Micro PC that
went nutty after 2 years. Velocity Micro still can't fix it despite
the fact it has been shipped to their company no less than 3 times.

In January I said "enough is enough" and took the biggest
gamble of my life in buying a Macintosh. For most brainwashed
PC users like myself, going Mac was the thing we were taught
never EVER to do. Even my fellow HTF Moderator staff were
telling me that I was "drinking the kool-aid" because I was
talking up the virtues of owning a Mac computer.

In the past 3 months I have thoroughly enjoyed my Mac
experience to the point where two weeks ago I ditched my
Lenovo laptop for a Macbook Pro. The time had come
for me to put that final nail in the coffin as far as Windows and
PCs were concerned.

After a year of owning a Lenovo, which is considered by some
to be the "Rolls Royce" of laptops, I can honestly say that
the Macbook Pro blows it out of the water.

Here are

1. Bootup time is much quicker with OS X than Windows.
My Lenovo laptop with its 7200rpm drive used to take 3 minutes
to load up completely with its startup programs to the point
where I could use it. On my Macbook Pro with its
slower hard drive it takes 25 seconds.

2. Anything APPLE makes is quality. That's one of the reasons
why you pay through the nose for it. You tend to admire the
design and build quality of an iPod when comparing it to all the
other MP3 players out there. Same goes for Mac computers.
These are the most attractive and well-built pieces of machinery
on the market. Even Consumer Reports this month rated Mac
desktops to be the most reliable of computers.

3. No unnecessary eye candy. I have said this many times
before --- Vista is a glorified Windows XP that has been doctored
up to look pretty. But you know what? It still has bugs, it still
crashes and there are many having problems upgrading to it.
With OS X I have yet to have a single crash. When you install
a program you simply drag it to a directory. When you uninstall
you simply drag it to a trash can. No registry crap to deal with
and none of the problems associated with one software not playing
nice with another.

Bottom line is that I have never enjoyed my computing experience
as much as I do now that I switched over to a Mac. I have even
managed to convince my co-workers to switch over and they thank
me almost on a daily basis for doing so.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Nope...never had a clue.

Congrats on the MBP purchase, Ron. Not only is it a fully functional desktop replacement, but its design is so damned cool. Twice I've flown redeyes back from California and both times when I've fired my MBP up to watch a DVD the people sitting next to me have been agog when they see that ambient light sensor set the keyboard aglow.

 

[Mike Heenan]

I just saw the promo for Leopard on apple's site, and it looks pretty awesome. I really like the ichat feature of sharing photos but I suspect you need another person with ichat to take advantage of all the features. I've read that Apple should be announcing the latest line of laptops/desktops pretty soon so it will be interesting to see what they release.

 

[JohnRice]

Ron, my first experience with the difference between the systems came years ago when someone asked me how you save a file to a floppy (OK, quite a few years ago) in Windows. You can now probably see why the very question didn't make any sense to me. One thing in your post stood out to me though. You said you replaced a 4K Windows machine, then commented that you "pay through the nose" for Macs. Macs really aren't much more eexpensive anymore. No, you can't get a $400 piece of crap that won't do squat, but you can get into a complete iMac for under 1K and a mini for $500.

From what I can tell, the only place Mac falls behind, and probably always will, is with gaming software, which doesn't get ported over very fast. Of course, that makes the typical Windows user argument that Macs are just pretty little toys and not for real computing a bit ironic.

 

[DaveF]

Good to hear Ron. I'm planning to buy MacBook Pro later this year -- this will be my first Mac and my first laptop.

Having grown up with all the wonderful 80's computers (Timex Sinclair, Atari 800, Atari ST, C64), used NeXT throughout college and other Unix systems, I fell that I've stagnated the past 15 years as I've been PC through and through. Sure, Starcraft and UT were fantastic reasons to have a PC, but like you I see Vista as XP rewarmed. Computers have gotten boring to me, and I want to bring some emotional excitement back into my home use, along with the normal functional performance.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

I'm loving my mac mini. I bought it about a month ago, but I'm coming over from linux, not windows. I feel mac offers the security of linux/unix, but with none of the mess. Linux was great, but it was too often a hassle to get a new device working. The "it just works" saying really is true, most of the time.

The kool-aid tastes great. I love my mac.

CJ

 

[Bill Mc]

I have been paying close attention to these threads. Like Ron, I have been a Windows user for years. I may take the plunge and get a Mac as my next computer. With the ability to boot in to Windows from a Mac now makes my decision even easier. The only thing holding me back at this point is the new OS coming out in the late Spring.

 

[bobbyg2]

As much of a dedicated windows user, I have to admit that Macs aren't the "pieces of crap" that a lot of other Windows users make it out to be. If I was to buy a Mac, it would probably be for it's graphics editing/film editing/etc. I enjoy making little animated videos and doing drawings (if you want to see some drawings, PM me).

Makes me want to reconsider my $900 upcoming computer build project.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Um...by "other Windows users"...do you happen to include yourself?

 

[Christ Reynolds]

how big of you. your preference may not be mac, but anyone who calls them "pieces of crap" is either looking for an argument, or has no experience with macs and is looking for an argument.

CJ

 

[bobbyg2]

I wasn't calling it a piece of crap because it's a mac, I just don't like old computers much. If it was an old Windows, I'd call that piece of crap as well. You guys just didn't read it right...

 

[Michael D. Bunting]

I just recently bought 2 new HP Vista laptops...and I'm loving them to death (one is mine...1 is my wife's).

I've ALMOST bought a Mac Mini a couple of different times over the past year or so...but could never pull the trigger.

When it comes time to buy another laptop in a couple of years or so...I promise I'll look at the Macs

 

[Craig S]

Hey Ron, was wondering if you were going to buy a MBP for Vegas...

I love mine. It's just a super-slick notebook. The backlit keyboard is about as cool as it gets (and really useful for me since I do theatrical sound design and it makes my notebook much more useable when the lights go down).

Now, c'mon Apple, let's get Leopard out...

 

[Christ Reynolds]

So you are referring to the Mac in the other thread, make no mention of it in this thread, and WE are reading it wrong? We read it just fine. You were talking about Windows vs. Mac, not your other computer. If you were talking about your other computer, you need to update your sentence construction skills.

CJ

 

[bobbyg2]

I'm guessing you are referring to this statement I made in the other thread:

"I'm done with that piece of $#!+ Mac"

I wasn't necessarily calling Macs pieces of $#!+, I was just referring to the computer being a piece of $#!+. If it was a windows, I would have said something similar to:

"I'm done with that piece of $#!+ PC!"

I'm not degrading macs in general, it's just that no one really considers 10-year-old computers as up-to-date. It's 10 years old, even Windows computers that are 10 years old suck.

 

[JohnRice]

Ya think?

 

[Christ Reynolds]

Nope, it was ME who had to guess that YOU were using that statement. Better to stop now Bobby, you're not getting anywhere with this one.

CJ

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Okay guys. Enough! Let's move on.

 

[Yee-Ming]

Reminds me of the old saying: "Windows 95 = Mac 84" which surfaced during Win 95's ballyhooed release back in 1995.

We got an iMac, the really cool G4 flatpanel connected on a swivel post to the half-volleyball CPU, back in 04 and absolutely loved it. Last year I got a MBP -- initially I was going to get just the MacBook, but they were on a two-week delay here, the initial shipment having sold out, then a friend pointed out to me that they were discounting the initial release MBPs that had 1.83GHz CPUs instead of the then-standard 2.0, and I figured that I don't do anything that'll suffer from the slightly slower CPU, whilst a S$600 discount was nothing to sniff at.

Some things are so "simple", yet work wonderfully on Macs, yet PCs still can't do them -- e.g. Expose.

Perhaps one gripe right now, which applies to the missus rather than me, is that her office uses Citrix for remote access to office email and servers, which has recently been upgraded but the new version isn't compatible with Macs at all. However, since her office also replaced her desktop with a laptop as the working machine, if she needs to work from home she simply brings that home instead now.

One hardware gripe: Mac DVD-ROM drives cannot be tweaked to change region indefinitely. A minor nuisance, but a real one for me since living in a non-R1 country does mean I have a fair number of non-R1 DVDs, which I can't play on my Macs -- not a big deal for the iMac, but when on the road it means I can only bring R1 discs with me if I'm using the MBP to play them.

Oh, actually, the biggest gripe is: I'm now so spoilt by my Macs, and get annoyed with dealing with the PC at work...

 

[Carlo_M]

On my MBP I have a bootcamp install because I have work-related programs that are XP only. When I first started using my MBP last summer, I was probably spending as much time on the XP side as the Mac side, and not just for work, but for comfort.

Now unless I absolutely need to use those work-related programs (about 5% of the time I'm on my MBP), I'm always on OSX.

I can't wait for Leopard and the academic versions of Adobe CS3 Design Standard (okay I might spring for Premium)!