My Mac Experiance

I had posted this in my old blog after chronicling my experience with owning a Mac. This was the final post but it pretty much summed up my experience at the time. I got a little heated at times, but I've cooled down now and still use my Mac from time to time. So here it is.

Intro:

Overall I'm not impressed. I guess there are a few cool features that might be unique to Mac but nothing I can't live without or reasonable reproduce on my PC. Let me break this down into a few categories for you and I'll TRY and explain my position the best I can.

User Interface:

Pretty. Very Pretty. Nice swooping icons and neat little animations and stuff. All though NONE of those features are useful or aid in productivity in anyway and pretty much serve only to eat CPU cycles and memory. I think overall functionality and usefulness are sacrificed.

-I hate how the main tool bar at the top changes based on what window is active. That crap drives me NUTS! put a tool bar in the window that way you can more quickly move between windows when working in multiple apps.

-That "dock" is annoying as crap! I'm not really sure what half that crap is down there, but it pretty much just got in the way.

-The "finder" Finds nothing.

-I just feel lost and kind of clueless with the whole thing. Where are my apps? How do I troubleshoot application issues (more on that later)? why to I have to jump through hoops to see what apps are running? All of the sudden I'm like why is my crap running so slow... I dig down into the apps/utilities/activity monitor and see that I've got about 9000 applications running. Where are they? How do I close them? When I drag something to the Applications folder, what really happens? Is the program installing? Is it just putting an icon in there?

-Why can't open more than one Terminal Window at a time?(more on that too)

Stability:
I'm not seeing it. The Mac OS is supposed to be this ultra-stable never reboot never crash etc... BULL CRAP! Couldn't be further from the truth. I have to reboot my Mac every day at least once, and when I say reboot, I mean hold the power button down and power it off and then power it back on. This think locks up tight as a drum whenever it's in powersave mode more than a few hours.

I often get that little black window that says, "Your computer needs to be restarted...press and hold the power button..blah blah". Most of the time though I can't get it out of sleep mode, the HDD spins up and then nothing happens. No video, no mouse, no keyboard it just dies.

Applications:

I tried to use a variaty of apps to test overall usability and whatever. There was a bit of a learning curve with the menus and hot-keys etc...

Safari is junk, that crap web browser locks my Mac up more then anything. There were two things that stuck out from all the other crap that browser did that made me go back to Firefox. First, before blowing my Mac away and putting the newest OSX on it, I downloaded the latest revision of Safari. I had an OLD version of IE on there that barely worked. The version of Safari I had on here wouldn't even display the Mac website so I had to use IE. (imagine that, I had to use a MS product to save a Mac)

Anyway, I used IE to download the latest Safari. It let me download it and install it. Then when I went to run it, it told me my OS version was too old and that Safari could not run. Are you kidding me?! It couldn't have told me that when I tried to install it? Whatever. Just stupid. After that I just bought the new OSX and did a complete rebuild, formatted the drive etc...

During my absence from blogging on this topic, Safari just stopped working. I clicked on Safari to open it, the little icon on the dock did it's gleeful little jump in the air...then nothing. No Safari. So I clicked it again... Same thing. Reboot once again. Nothing. Still no workie workie. Well, shoot. Now what? I can't get to the internet to download Safari or anything else for that matter, what do I do? I figured there had to be an error log SOMEWHERE to tell me why the app crashed and maybe from that I could figure out a was to fix it... Nope. I can't find anything to help. Where are the program files so I can check permissions or look for some sort of log, or error or maybe run the app form a differnt location etc... Nope. I'm stuck. I have one Icon to click on that doesn't work. I'm trying everything... I can't find ANY app that will allow me to get to the internet independent of Safari to download a new copy. (I'm sure if I knew of an FTP site somewhere I could probably use the Terminal app and get a copy that way, but come on.)

So again, my PC to the rescue! I downloaded the MAC version of Firefox to my Windows 2003 server and installed it from over the network. Screw Safari. Even with all of Firefox's issues, I still like it the best.

The terminal thing. Remember how I said that I sucks that I can't open more the one terminal window at a time. Well, this is why it was a problem. I had setup a test rig to simulate separate networks and an "internet" connection etc... and created a VPN tunnel between the two over the 3rd blah blah blah. It was a way too elaborate excessive for something that I pretty much could have just done in a real environment. Whatever it was cool. So I needed 3 workstations and my Cisco 3560G and three Cisco 871 security routers(I know, I know why did I need the 3rd router when the 3560 is an L3 switch?). One of those workstations was the Mac. So on my main Windows(Vista Business-64) workstaion I opened a HyperTerminal Console session to the router on that VLAN and opened a few command prompt windows to ping the internal interface, external interface and a few devices on each of the remote networks. I did the same on my Windows XP-Pro notebook, then it was time for the Mac. First of all, no serial port. So using the console to configure the router was out of the question. So I pop open the terminal app to Telnet... Oh..shoot. It's not configured yet, so configuring the IP addresses and stuff will require me to change the IP address on my Mac and connect via telnet, then configure the router, as soon as I change the IP on the router then I loose connection, I'll have to scramble to change the IP on then Mac again to reconnect and HOPE that loosing the connection to the router didn't cause it to goof up the settings.(also you can forget a cut and paste into a Telnet session because the interfaces get configured early on in the config so, as soon as the IP changes the rest of the config stops) Screw that. PC to the rescue once again. OK, I configured the router from my PC and hooked it back up to that Mac.

lets open a few Terminal windows so I can start pinging all the interfaces that will tell me if my VLAN configuration and VPN tunnel is working...Uhh.. I click on terminal again and nothing happens. Are you kidding me? I can't ping multiple devices at the same time? Whatever. So I took my wife's Windows (Vista Business-32) workstation and configured it on that VLAN.... I still used the Mac just as a device on that VLAN to ping but, I could have used a printer for that.

There are a few things that I did like. The Front Row thing is pretty cool. I liked the "Dashboard" or whatever it's called. Garage band is pretty cool and a lot cheaper than Sony Vegas so that's good. ummm what else... iLife is a stupid waste of money... That's pretty much it.

Summary:

So, in my opinion Macs are exactly what I thought. Pretty much a gimmicky expensive way to surf the internet, get email and watch some movies. It pretty much takes the user and puts them on a technological island and isolates them from the rest of the world. Which certainly fits the typical Mac user demographic. However the second part is a direct contradiction to that mentality. Once you buy a Mac you are stuck with buying Mac stuff from this point on. Mac peripherals, Mac Software, Mac hardware, etc... This, to me, is the ultimate contradiction to the demographic. Those people are typically the Global thinking(not a bad thing), anti-corporate, share with everyone, include everyone, everyone should have everything type of people. Macs are priced out of the "everyone" market, your are thrust into the Corporate "iWorld". iEVERYTHING. The ultimate corporate control. I don't get it. How does that fit?

So, what am I doing with my Mac now? I'll still use it. I've got my mixing board hooked up to it so I'll do any of my music recording on it. It's really nice to have on my desk as a secondary PC so I can be playing MS Flight Simulator X on my PC and be looking at maps or terminal charts on my Mac. It basically allows me to keep my Laptop downstairs hooked up to my TV for Netflix streaming (which doesn't work at all on the Mac) and still have an extra workstation to use. I've purchased movie tickets and planned camping trips on it while using my PC for something else. That's nice.

I guess that's it. Basic functionality with a premium price and a higher cost of ownership. I have a funny Apple Store story from a coworker that I may share at a later time.

Brian