Macs making geeks happy the World over
Posted 20 November 2007, by Aaron
Last week I revealed to the World something that’s had me quite excited for a while now: that I was a Mac owner in waiting.
Well, the waiting is over and for the last five days my brand new Mac Pro has been taking a pasting as I’ve made it earn it’s position on my desk. So how’s she doing? And how have I found the experience?
Christmas has come early
Last Friday I finished work early because I couldn’t bare the thought of my new toy just sitting at home all boxed up and feeling lonely whilst I wasted valuable Mac-time sitting at my desk doing far less important things. I rushed home to find a larger-than-expected box waiting for me.
After opening the box up in a frenzy of excitement and getting the beast up and running, one of the first things I did was unplug it all again and open her up. I had an extra 2 Gb of RAM to stick inside her and an extra 500 Gb hard drive. What a lucky little Mac!
In my life I’ve opened up more PC’s than you can shake a stick at and it’s always the same. Turning the thing upside down, twisting fiddly screws at the back, damning your clumsy fat fingers when you drop that tiny screw into the deepest corner of the motherboard, wiping the sweat from your brow as you nervously stick your fingers into inaccessible crannies to remove and replace delicate cards and components - you know what it’s like.
The first thing that struck me about the Mac Pro is how much of a pleasure it is opening her up. One sturdy lever at the back releases the aluminium side plate revealing what can only be described as a work of art. The build of the Mac Pro is unbelievably solid, everything is organised into a neat modular layout and everything just slides out with ease and and clicks back in to place with reassuring solidity.
The sign of a true convert
There are two Mac applications that historically I’ve never been much of a fan of: namely iTunes and iPhoto. There are lots of reasons why I was anti these apps but mainly it was to do with there being better alternatives on the PC - Winamp and Picassa respectively. After spending a few days really getting to know iTunes and iPhoto I can reveal that I am truely converted - I love them both!
With iTunes it’s just feels and performs much better than it ever did on my PC - it just feels as if it belongs on the Mac. My 16 Gb of music is now sat on my Mac and iTunes is getting a lot more use than Winamp ever did because… it’s better!
With iPhoto I have to admit, I’m not sure if I still prefer Picassa or not. In the past I’ve tried iPhoto and it’s fallen short of my expectations. However, iPhoto 08 introduces the new feature of ‘events’ - the equivalent of albums. This new feature alone is a VAST improvement over previous versions of iPhoto and if nothing else it certainly pars with Picassa.
So far there is only one thing that is disappointing me with the Mac, and that’s my beloved Firefox. It’s crap! Firefox crashes on me several times every day and I have to do a forced quit. It seems to be when using JavaScript intensive sites or apps like Gmail, Google Docs etc.
Unfortunately my research seems to suggest I’m not the only one with Firefox problems on OS-X and there’s not much to be done about it. Safari, Opera and Camino are all good browsers that work well, but they don’t have any of my Firefox plugins which unfortunately have become essential parts of my browsing experience these days. For now I’ll stick with Firefox but I’m sure hoping it becomes more stable with future releases.
So to conclude, I’m absolutely in love with my Mac. The PC still clings on to a small amount of desk space as I haven’t finished moving everything across yet and I don’t have any of the Adobe tools for OS-X. However, the PC knows its days are numbered - it’s been dumped for a sexier machine that is a better performer, and well, just has a nicer personality.
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I ADORE iTunes. Have for a long time, but I totally agree about Picasa. I miss it even though I’ve grown to love iPhoto as well. Interesting that you refer to your machine as “she”. 
All my machines are girls too. LOL. 
Jake
21 November 2007, 2:24 am