Mac thoughts

So… Switching to Mac. I’d considered writing about this for a while, but held off until now to try to get a clear picture in my head about things I like and don’t like about the whole experience. Most of it relates to both MacBook and iMac, but I happen to be using company-provided MacBook more, so expect the list to be tilted slightly that way.

The Good

• Had only had to force a reboot once, when a co-worker tried to use his remote control on my MacBook while it was sleeping to try to spook me, but fell prey to the bug that was fixed in 10.4.10 later on
• Slick and doesn’t get in your way, which is quite opposite to the experience we had at the office while trying out Vista on one of the machines; its effects were nice to look at, but only for the first 10 minutes
• Just as commercials imply, it does come with pretty much everything you need; obviously professionals will need extras, but for a home user this is as complete a machine as any in terms of packaged software; iLife is awesome and I look forward to migrating all our 7,000 photos to iPhoto when Leopard with Time Machine comes out
• The hardware is beautiful and feels solid; I’d never thought I’d enjoy holding a bright white MacBook on my lap so much after using various ThinkPads for a number of years
• Outstanding Airport Extreme integration; nothing beats wireless freedom when it comes to attached storage and printers
• Parallels, TextMate, Transmission, Connect360, iWork, Stellarium

The Bad

• Don’t care much about iMac, but the MacBook gets quite warm and uncomfortable if you hold it on your lap for extended periods of time; iStat displays CPU temperature upwards of 65 degrees Celsius at times, which is right about where I would have had hardware alarms set on P3 CPUs a few years ago
• No built-in backup solution, but Time Machine is coming; right now iBackup seems to do the trick, although I haven’t had to use its restore feature yet
• No VGA or DVI and even though you can buy adapters separately I think they should have been included in the box for all but the lowest priced models
• Too many good applications to choose from!

That’s about it, I’m sure I’ll have more as time rolls by, but overall impression is that there’s not a single tiny reason left to use a PC at home (or even at work for most of us) anymore. If anyone’s thinking of buying new hardware, think hard about the Mac, you won’t regret it.

Leopard WWDC build is out!

… but only for Select and Premier ADC members and all the same NDA rules still apply, so you can bet on very little coverage from me. Yes, ever since I got my first Mac about a month ago, I’ve become a complete Mac fanboy, so sue me ;)