Pondering Switching to Mac

This weekend has been a bit of an interesting experiment – I borrowed a 12″ MacBook Pro test machine from work to take Mac OS X for a spin. My personal machine is starting to show its age after five years, and I can’t say Vista is an especially appealing prospect. If I’m going to have to buy new hardware anyway, I figured I’d take the Mac for a spin (after coveting them at the Apple store for the better part of a year). Actually, now that I think about it, this is not entirely a new experience given that I owned a PowerBook 180 back in university.

After a weekend of playing around on it, I’m pretty impressed. The positives:

  • Beautiful construction: The laptop body itself is solid as a rock. It’s sturdy and feels finished, especially compared the plastic of my Dell.
  • Keyboard action: There’s something about the snappy spring of the keyboard that is simply satisfying.
  • UNIX toolset: I admit it – the first thing I install on Windows is Cygwin. Not having to do that on Mac OS X is a nice value-add.

There are, however, some items that I find annoying. The behavior of windows is a pain; there is some inconsistency about how windows are opened that I find leave the impression of clutter (I’m a full-window man, all the time). I’m also suffering from some apprehension over applications. While most of my applications are either cross-platform or web-based, I can’t help but shake lingering concerns. I mean, Mac OS support is always a secondary concern for most software vendors – what if something really cool comes out, but it’s only available on Windows. Parallels and BootCamp ease this concern a bit, but not completely.

What I’m really curious about is what bugs people about the Mac. What are the features that irk you? What’s the stuff that really annoyed you after you switched to Mac OS X?

Billie Jobs

Ashley and I attended the Mac event (The Macintosh Marketing Story: Fact and Fiction, 20 Years Later) tonight at the Computer History Museum. In attendance were numerous members of the original Mac team. The best part about this event was the numerous Steve Jobs stories.

Me with Donald KnuthIn one anecdote, Andy Cunningham recalled a trip to New York City. They arrived late and Steve, as usual, had to rearrange the furniture in the hotal room. He needed the furniture to be just right, as he could never stand the way hotel rooms were arranged. And he needed a big bowl of strawberries. With whipped cream. On the side. And a baby grand piano (despite not being able to play the piano). And some flowers of a variety he couldn’t agree on with Andy, not that it mattered, given that it was the middle of winter in NYC and nearly midnight.

The next day, the photo shoot proceeded as planned. Unfortunately, Steve hates working with photographers, and is normally extremely uncooperative. Luckily for the photographer, Steve was really into Michael Jackson at the time – in particular the song “Billie Jean”. Thus, Andy spent the entire film shoot watching Steve cooperate with the photographer in bursts of three “Billie Jean”-filled minutes, then desperately rewinding the tape to the beginning of the song.

These are not the stories you read about in Business Week.

Besides listening to the stories, I got the chance to meet two renowned pioneers in computing: Donald Knuth, and Margaret Wozniak. While you may recognize Knuth as the author of The Art of Computer Programming, the exhaustive catalog of computer science knowledge, you might wonder: who’s Margaret Wozniak?

She is the person without whom Apple would not exist: Steve Wozniak‘s mother.