MacNoob

I hate the “switcher” label. It implies that someone using a Mac for the first time has abandoned all other platforms entirely. I do love my Macbook Pro, but I still have four other Windows machines in my home, two of them running Vista Ultimate, and I really like them also. I think it has become fashionable to dump on Vista. Quite frankly, I’m getting a bit bored by all of it. The “main” PC in the MacNoob household is a Dell Core2 Duo and Vista works just as well on it as OS X does on my Macbook Pro. In fact, there are many aspects of Windows I find superior to OS X. Not to say OS X isn’t a fine platform, it is, its just that Windows has its’ strengths and OS X does too. What are they, you ask? First, Windows is upgradeable. If I want a bigger hard drive, I just install it. If I want a new video card, same story. If I want to add more firewire or eSATA ports, I just slip the new card in and bingo! With these pluses come the minuses. Drivers can sometimes be an issue. This is where I think Vista got its bad rap. The hardware manufacturers were woefully tardy delivering Vista drivers. Subsequently, lots of people wound up with printers that wouldn’t print, video cards that wouldn’t display properly and a host of other gizmos that worked fine with XP but gave Vista headaches. The same people who trash Vista now must have forgotten what a pain XP was when it first released. Now that Vista has been out for a while, PC makers have caught up nicely and things just work right out of the box. My Dell typically runs for weeks without error or need to otherwise restart. The key to the Mac’s stability is the absolute authoritarian nature of Apple. OS X only runs on Apple hardware, period. Most people don’t know or care to know what an infinitely smaller problem set that is for an operating system manufacturer to code for. For all you Mac fanboys out there, flexibility and stability are trade-offs! Given the virtual cornucopia of hardware combinations Vista runs on, its a miracle the OS will boot at all! Apple has done a marvelous job creating a sleek and sexy lineup of machines that run very well. To be an Apple user, however, YOU MUST COMPLY!
I bought my Macbook Pro the day Leopard was released but it came with Tiger pre-installed. I ran Tiger only briefly (about two weeks) until my Leopard disk arrived. Guess what, when I upgraded to Leopard my DAW software and firewire mixer quit working altogether. It took Alesis, the firewire mixer manufacturer, almost three months to get the first beta driver published. Steinbergh, the DAW publisher, didn’t have a working version of Cubase for leopard until late February. I heard a few complaints about OS X in the first months, but they paled in comparison to the outright lynch-mob mentality prevalent in Vista editorials.
My Mac is a ton of fun to work with. It does what it does very well. Core animation and core audio are, in my opinion, better technologies than their Win32 counterparts. So, when I need to create and/or edit audio or video my Mac is my choice. For most other tasks I default to my Windows machines. It may be because I haven’t figured out how to do some of those tasks on my Mac yet. Time will tell.

admin Apple Minutia, OS X Apple, Leopard, Vista, Windows