Quote:
| Windows expert Preston Gralla was challenged to work with Apple's MacBook Air for two weeks. Will he ever go back to a PC? April 16, 2009 (Computerworld) - I've been on the front lines of the Mac-PC war for as long as I can remember. My first work computer was an IBM PC with an 8088 CPU. I liked it so much I forked out the money to buy my own machine: an IBM PC XT clone running an 8086 chip, and bulging with 640KB of RAM and a whopping 20MB hard disk. Since then, I've written dozens of books and hundreds or thousands of articles, columns and blogs about PCs and Windows. Along the way, I've earned the unending enmity of plenty of Mac folks. At one point several years ago, I was targeted by hundreds of Mac fans in an e-mail barrage because I used to write a column about shareware that covered only PC software and ignored the Mac. More recently on my Computerworld Windows blog, I've been called various schoolyard I've been called various schoolyard epithets when I've written anything remotely critical about Macs or people who use them. So it was with more than a little trepidation that I accepted a new assignment from my editor (sort of a follow-up to my article "Living free with Linux: 2 weeks without Windows") to give up my PC and try living for two weeks on the Mac. Talk about sleeping with the enemy! I asked for a laptop rather than a desktop, and what showed up on my front door about a week later was the latest MacBook Air, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.83 GHz, 2GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeoForce 9400M graphics processor and a 128GB solid-state hard disk. It sported a 13.3-in. screen and weighed in at a very svelte 3 pounds. And so began my journey with a Mac. ........ The final verdict What did I learn after several weeks of living with the Mac? First off, I had expected there to be a longer learning curve, and had thought that in the long run there wouldn't be much of a difference between the Mac and a PC. After all, an operating system is just an operating system. To a certain extent that's true. When you use productivity applications themselves, there's not a great deal of difference between using them on a Mac versus using them on a PC. However, when it came to the operating system itself, there's certainly a difference, and a substantial one. Mac OS X is simpler to use and easier to configure, yet has more bells, whistles and "eye candy." And much of that eye candy, such as Exposé, is not just elegantly designed and entertaining, but quite useful as well. That's not to say that every aspect of the Mac is superior to the PC. Vista's Network and Sharing Center, and especially the Network Map, is an excellent, simple, all-in-one destination for networking that Mac OS X would do well to emulate. Overall, though, Mac OS X beats Windows. There, I've said it. And lightning hasn't struck me yet. However, there's no doubt that you often pay extra for a Mac; there really is a Mac tax, even if Microsoft has overstated the amount of that tax. But after living with a Mac, I can understand why people would be willing to pay the tax. Am I giving up PCs for the Mac? Certainly not. I've got multiple PCs at home, including those that run Windows XP, Windows Vista and a beta of Windows 7. And I've got one that dual-boots into either XP or Linux running Ubuntu. Replacing all those machines with Macs would be prohibitively expensive, and simply not worth the effort. As for the MacBook Air, for a portable machine, it's perfect in just about every way but one -- its price tag. Still, I've bit the bullet and am buying one, used. This isn't about productivity or getting work done; it's pure machine lust. |
Linear Mode
