Making The Switch

I have spent the past few days bonding with my new Mac. We now have four Macs in the house: a fully loaded Power Mac G5 for the studio, a 17-inch iMac G5, a portable iBook G4 and the new 20-inch iMac G5. I also have four Wintel boxes along with an xbox classic and an xbox 360. I have installed a small nuclear plant to keep all this processing power up and running.

This is the first time, though, that I have made a specific switch to a Mac as a general purpose computer. In my office, I looked at my use of the Wintel box over the past several months. My main activities: email, web browsing, digital photo management, web development, digital photo editing, document creation (Word/PowerPoint), financial management, games.

I was ready to make the switch for a number of reasons. Mac has about 25 million active desktops. Although a small fraction of the PC market, there is a lot of critical mass for the platform. My reasons for making the switch?

1. Lack of spam, viruses and spyware. It is refreshing to work on a machine where the underlying architecture gives you freedom from gunkware and viruses.

2. Stable. I guess part of the stability comes from Unix under the hood. I have used Macs under heavy load in the studio for years without a system crash. I am sure it happens. I just haven’t seen it yet.

3. No nagging. I spent the past couple of days setting up my new environment. This involved installing web development environments, browsers, email, photo editing tools and so on. When I first set up the Mac there were no 50 digit codes to put in the machine and there was no product activation.

4. Simpler environment. I have always admired the strength of the experience on the Mac platform. A great UI, slick software and the whole environment just works better.

5. Graphics. Quartz and OpenGL have been used to create a remarkable, translucent look for the desktop. The display is sharper and vibrant which is great for all the graphics work that I do.

6. Advanced networking. I just plugged it in to my home network. No drivers, no complicated setup routines.