What Is It About The Mac?
One of the things I picked up during my trip to the office this week was an iBook. It’s one of the small iBooks with 576mb of RAM and a 500 Mhz G3 processor. It’s by no means a speed demon, certainly slower than the new Core Duo-based processor Macs that were announced at MacWorld this week. At this point, I’m not sure I actually *needed* the iBook, except that it was going to the scrap heap if I didn’t get my hands on it. But I like it.
Why is that? Is it Mac OS X? Is it the fact that stuff just works without having to think about it too much? Is it the fact that Apple actually spends the time to design their hardware so that it’s got both form and function? Is it the 31337 feeling I get in using a Mac while everyone else is just using an ordinary PC? Maybe it’s all of the above.
Of course, I don’t just use a Mac. I use a Windows PC as well as Linux. I use them all because a single Operating System just doesn’t cut it. None of them have all the apps that I need or function in the way that I like. The Mac is certainly the closest in this regard, but there is the small problem of applications. None of the applications I need to use on a regular basis aren’t available on the Mac–and we’re not talking about things like Microsoft Office either, which are obviously available.
Aside from a particular CRM Application that I must use that is obsolete and has a less-than-zero chance of ever getting a Macintosh version, I have plenty of Internet Explorer-only sites that I need to access. Certainly Internet Explorer for the Mac exists, but it is deprecated and even Microsoft says to use “something else.” Tell all those sites I use to code to non-Microsoft standards. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen, even if Firefox has 10% market share now.
I guess my best hope at this point is an Intel-based Mac with Crossover Office, once it has been ported to Mac OS X. Of course, even that approach has issues, but I am looking forward to trying it out.
