The Verdict?

It's been over a month: and I'm still using a Mac.

I spent my Spring Break using nothing but PCs, and although I had been using PCs all throughout my 1-month Macdate period my break was the first time that I had used nothing but PCs for an entire week. It was necessary for me to move back to exclusive PC usage for a bit in order to truly confirm what I had felt about OS X; I needed to make sure that I wasn't simply being blinded by something new.

The first thing I realized when moving back to a PC was that having a single application open that takes up the entire screen is a mental blessing and a productivity curse. For example, right now I'm typing this blog in a text editor window under OS X surrounded by and overlapping at least 8 other windows - on this monitor alone. The majority of those windows have a decent amount of text in them and it can get a bit draining staring at everything at once (it's also too cumbersome to minimize every window individually). In a situation like this one, a single maximized application is much easier to focus on. I found myself enjoying running Word and writing a document more under Windows XP, as long as I wasn't trying to do anything else.

Once I got to doing some more serious work, then I began to really miss OS X. Case in point: using any application where multiple windows are open. I missed Exposé like you would not believe. For whatever reason I didn't miss Exposé much when I was at school on my laptop (although I did consciously hit F10 a few times just to bring back good memories), but without my daily fix of Exposé I was going stir crazy. I had a handful of IE windows open on the PC I was using and searching through all of them to find the one I wanted was so painful. I ALT-TABBED and held ALT down forever as I tried to remember which browser window I wanted. Granted a tabbed browser like Firefox would alleviate some of those issues but unfortunately not all apps are tabbed and there are a lot of cases where I use both tabs and multiple windows to be efficient.

The next conclusion I came to was that as nice as the Apple keyboard looks, I still prefer a good MS Natural keyboard. Although I know you can remap the Windows keys to Apple keys it would be nice to have something better directly from Apple. As far as input devices go, Apple just seems to have gotten it very wrong with the G5. The single button mouse receives so much criticism it can't possibly be helping Apple; I was talking to someone the other day who completely opposed getting an Apple out of the principle that their machines come by default with no more than a single button mouse. It seems like a silly reason to rule out an entire platform, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of people are turned off by it. While Apply couldn't get away with a single-key keyboard, the keyboard is definitely form-over-function and thus I'm not a big fan of it. Plus, white isn't the best color for a heavily used keyboard.

I'm not a fan of the organization (or lack thereof) of folders under OS X, or maybe it's just that I'm not familiar enough with the directory structure of OS X yet to feel at home. I find myself putting far too much important stuff on the desktop and not enough elsewhere, mostly because I don't know where I really want to put it. I find that the Save dialog boxes are too small, only showing me a handful of folders at a time as opposed to what I'm used to under Windows.

I just can't seem to bring myself to use Firefox; it's a great browser but the keyboard shortcuts are different from all my other OS X apps and there are more page rendering issues with Firefox that I've noticed than with Safari. I was hoping that the latest OS X update (10.3.3) would bring me a faster Safari but my wishes weren't granted as Safari still renders pages entirely too slowly. What's also annoying is that the auto-complete of URLs that you all taught me doesn't always seem to work instantaneously. Just typing anandtech and hitting enter will usually just tack on a www. and a .com around the word but sometimes it sits there and contemplates what it is doing before taking any action. I'm a performance nut and a big part of having a fast system is making sure that everything is as responsive as possible, this one little thing irks me beyond belief. Oh and I'd like a faster rendering Safari anytime now :)

The more I have to use Adobe Reader the more I really, really appreciate Apple's Preview. I was talking to a die-hard PC user friend of mine today and even he was envious watching me use Preview instead of Reader for my PDF browsing. I do wish there was a way to be in a directory with images and have Preview flip through the images for me without having to highlight them all and open them that way. I used to use ACDSee to do this back before Windows XP had it built in, but it would be nice to have under OS X as well (unless there's some way I'm not considering).

I have yet to find a ftp client that fulfills all of my needs. The only remaining requirement that would seal the deal for my comfort with any OS X ftp client: implicit SFTP support (Port 990). I have yet to find a (good) client that supports implicit SFTP. I have found a couple, but they either crash a lot or they look like they were developed for Mac OS back in the 80s. Any recommendations?

During my Macless period I did use an iMac for a very brief period; for basic email and browsing the iMac was fine, but then again I didn't try to really push the system hard at all. Just today I was stuck using a G4 1GHz on campus and that was an extremely painful experience. The system was using OS X 10.2 and thus didn't have a lot of the features I was used to, not to mention that the default web browser was IE (IE for the Mac is *horrible*). The system had 512MB of RAM but it was slow as a dog (granted it wasn't as sluggish as some of the old Willamette based Pentium 4s (1.7GHz) that were sitting around the lab I was in) but it was horrendous. The system had Adobe Reader set to view PDFs (not Preview) and Safari would crash if you tried to run it, which brings up an interesting point: if I had never used a Mac and that was my first experience, I would never ever touch one of these things. The OS was also configured much differently than my copy of 10.3.3 is configured, for example Command + Tab didn't bring up a Windows-like bar of all the applications open, instead it just highlighted applications in the Dock. If Apple is to ever get back above the 2% market share they are at right now, even the worst systems out there in the public need to be configured much better than this one was. It's not Apple's fault, rather the fault of sysadmins for these labs, but maybe Apple's success isn't at the top of their priority list.

Multitasking on the G4 was a joke compared to the G5, although the minimize animations were surprisingly smooth, switching between Adobe Reader and MS Word sometimes took at least a full second before the application I switched to actually appeared on the screen. Again, if that were my first experience with a Mac, I would've vowed against ever touching the platform. It was quite satisfying to be able to hop on the G4 and be just as comfortable as I am under Windows, which is something I've never been able to do in the past. If anything, the fact that this experiment has enabled me to do just that is extremely rewarding. I used to have no problem if the only open computer in a computer lab happened to be a Mac, I would just remain frustrated while using it, but now I can feel oddly at home with the situation - while criticizing the lab systems for much more than just being a Mac.

Someone once asked if I felt any more secure knowing that there were no viruses or OS exploits that I needed to worry about while using OS X. It definitely feels nice, but I'm not getting too comfortable - if the Apple market expands, we'll definitely have OS X's fair share of destructive programs.

Given that I've used the G5 for more than a month now, what are some things I'm still getting used to?

1) Page up and Page Down don't actually take your cursor up/down a page, they just scroll. This is quite useful, but I'm not used to it yet. Command + Up/Down does the same thing Page Up/Down does in Windows.

2) I would be used to home/end not functioning the same way they do in Windows, except for the extremely annoying fact that they do work like they do in Windows while using any MS Office application for OS X. I'm not normally a critic of Microsoft (I tend to like their products), but damn you Microsoft for not complying in an environment that's not your own.

3) Not being able to hit Windowskey + R to be my starting point for navigating my hard drive. Yes, I know, install LaunchBar; I will...soon.

4) iCal - I just can't bring myself to use it.

But honestly, that's about it. Frightened? I'm not, I like being proficient with another OS/platform. And I have enough other PCs in the house to handle my gaming or any sort of tweaking needs I have to fulfill. The G5 will most likely remain my AT-Work machine.

What's next? There's a lot more, but I've made a few definite decisions:

1) I'm keeping the G5. (cmon, as "cool" as it is to jump on the AppleSucks bandwagon, when have I ever come off as a fanboy?)

2) There will be an AT Mac section.

3) I will continue this blog, although I'm not certain what direction it will take - it may eventually get moved (at least the Macdates) to the AT Mac section.

I apologize for the delay in the Macdate, and for those of you who are bored by my ramblings I apologize for the length. As I mentioned at the beginning of this experiment, there will be an article summarizing all of this (and more). When will it be published? Most likely after the new site launches and I actually have some time to put a good amount of effort into it. School is over (and I mean *over*) for me after May 11th, but hopefully I'll have some time before then to get this thing polished and out.

That's it for now, more Macdates later.