TalkRhubarb

For almost a month now I’ve been the proud owner of a Apple Mac mini. One Wed afternoon I purchased from the Apple refurbished store and less than 24hrs later TNT delivered the box of delights to my door. Having never had to resort to a putty knife to open a computer before, I was rather apprehensive about beefing up the RAM to 1Gb - but the operation went flawlessly and the performance improvement was considerable.

Now the mini has had two major benefits. First and foremost it’s a new toy for me play with. But secondly, I get brownie points with Fiona who was never happy with the noise, size and generally unsightly nature of the PC in the living room. When it appeared she asked incredulously if the little white box was all there was to it!

Not being a big gamer I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to get a mac. My time on the computer is mainly spent doing a little photo and video editing, a bit of DTP/Word processing, powerpoint presentations and surfing/email. I’m an ideal candidate to migrate away from Microsoft. My numerous attempts at getting Linux working on one PC or another all ended in some hardware/driver issue requiring more time/effort/knowledge than I had. I always just resorted in frustration to shoving in a Windows disk and getting a PC that worked (for a while at least!) an hour later. So what do I love and hate about my mac?

I love…
1) It looks great! Not just the box either, with the screen savers, the shadows on windows on the desktop, it’s great.
2) Finally - it’s unix that works! I’ve got an alternative to the “system preferences” (The Mac equivalent of the “control panel”) I’ve got a terminal window and can use all the old unix command line stuff.
3) Those bundled mac applications are pretty good
4) Keynote - it’s taken a little while to get used to keynote after powerpoint, but some of the transitions are great and finally I can overlay text on video- something powerpoint still can’t do.
5) Security - firewall etc.,
6) Developer tools including preinstalled perl and python and great scripting abilities. Apple have made it so easy to get into programming os X.
7) Apache webserver installed by default.
The thing’s so quiet! And it doesn’t get hot.
9) it worked right out of the box! I plugged in the ethernet connection to my router, pressed the power button and before I knew it I was surfing the net.

not so keen on -
1) getting my PC keyboard mapped correctly. I had to downlaod a GB layout file from the internet. I thought this should have been dealt with more straghtforwardly in the OS itself.
2) I thought the BSD ports found in darwinports would be good way of accessing all the opensource software available for Linux on the Mac. But so many ports weren’t up to date and gave compile errors. I’ve had better success with Fink, but at least a lot of those apps are precompiled binaries which is better for me because…
3) On the 1.25Ghz G4 compiling from source takes ages.
4) Appleworks. MS Office it aint! It balked at a Word file with hyperlinks in it. Mmmmm. I’ve got a copy of Neo Office which works well though (it’s OpenOffice for mac) and AbiWord which I like on the PC too. I haven’t felt the need to get a copy of Office for Mac yet.
5) Closing all the windows of an application doesn’t quit the application generally. It just closes all the windows of an application. That’s taken a bit of gettng used to.
6) ctrl-C ctrl-V don’t work. It’s windowskey-C windowskey-V on my PC keyboard. I’m still not used to that yet.

Observations I’m ambivalent about:
1) There seems to be a charge for small utilities for mac. On Windows there’s an expectation that you could get something to do the job for free. I’m all for programmers making a living by charging for their work and mac users in general seem to be prepared to part with cash for useful little programs in the way windows users just aren’t. If you’re a one man band developing software it makes sense to develop for mac despite the much smaller user base.

Now there’s nothing described above that can’t be done on a PC with some tweaking - but I’m impressed by the results achieved with relatively modest hardware in comparison to the PC world. It strikes me that mac users focus on what they can do with the technology as a means to a creative end - as opposed to PC users who seem to focus more on the technology as an end in itself.

At the moment I’m glad I still have PC as well the mac. But my experience so far tells me that situation might not last forever