A week with a Mac

Well, where did that week go!

I thought I'd share my experience here, mainly so I can go back after a few months/years and recall exactly wtf I was thinking perhaps...but we'll see.

I've gotta say, right now, at this second, I'm now a Mac convert. My opinion may change over time, but right at this point in time, I'm loving it. There is two main reasons for this:

1. I don't have time to deal with "crap"
2. I dont like dealing with "crap"

Now "crap" may be a harsh word when it comes to describing windows configuration tasks, but really, this day in age, no-one should have to go through some of the driver pain that people go through to get windows to do everything they want. Chipset, vid card, sound drivers, change resolution etc. Now, unfortunately, this is the nature of the beast, IE, an OS for every machine. Windows on mac hardware via bootcamp still has all these problems, but at this point in my life, I don't want to have to deal with this "crap". Fire it up, bam, working. New driver out? Thats cool, system update will sweep it up next week and install it for me.

I'm also not missing any software from windows. I was living in the iTunes ecosystem anyway from my iphone, so that was no biggy. All my chat gear was there, and safari runs on webkit, so I don't miss chrome (although chrome for mac is available). Echofon for twitter is great, as it syncs read tweets with echofon on iphone (so awesome). Steam is up and running, and I played a few rounds of CS:Source and Portal, so thats all good. SC2 I assume works for mac, so I might grab that soon...if I feel like it.

So, thats all the good....and seeing as I appreciate balanced reporting...what about the negatives?

Well, the big negative is the fact that one of the ram sticks died within 6 days of owning it. The machine came with applecare, which means that they can send someone to fix it, however I'm too far from the nearest centre for this to happen. I rang the service centre, and they wanted me to post the whole thing to them, which is ridiculous given it's a single SO-DIMM that is the problem. I've posted it to them, and I'm awaiting a return part....hopefully to arrive soon.

The other negatives revolve around the learning curve of using this thing. Most things are the same, however after 15 years of Ctrl-C being copy, changing to Command-C (with the button effectively where alt is on a pc keyboard) takes some time. Most of the rest of using it is fairly straight forward though.

So....time will tell how this goes, but in the mean time, I will enjoy the simplicity that is OS:X.

So much so that I put it on the Dell Mini 9 I have here :)