Mac Zealots Ruin It For Everyone

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Many Mac users consider me a Mac hater. I don’t know why because I don’t hate Macs but they think I hate the Mac operating system, Mac users, and them in general. Ok, that’s a half-lie, I do know why they think I hate Macs but since I don’t actually hate the Mac OS I like to pretend that I don’t know why.

My first venture into the computing world was on a MS Windows machine. I was never really impressed with the original 3.x world of Windows and I actually was very interested in this Macintosh machine from Apple that everybody seemed to rave about. To hear people talk about the Mac it was the pinnacle in computing. It never crashed. It was faster than the any PC. It could leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to use a Mac. I think it was sometime around 1997 or so. Contrary to everything I had been told, it crashed. In fact, it crashed quite often. Windows wasn’t perfect (by a far stretch) but I had been using it long enough to get a feel for the types of things that would make it crash. On the Mac I was left completely bewildered at why it would crash. I had no point of reference like I did on Windows.

The crashing was not what caused me to turn a crtical eye toward the Mac though. It was the fanactics who kept claiming Macs don’t crash. Since I was supplied my Mac through the company I was working for it was easy to get another Mac and another Mac and the problems were the same. I quickly began to deduce that the problem wasn’t with “my” Mac but with Macs in general.

To be honest I could care less what platform I’m working on in the desktop environment. I like Windows (NT, XP, and 2000) because for nearly anything I want to do there are 20 applications to choose from from third party outfits. That’s one of the advantages MS brings to the table with a 90 something percent control of the computing world. But it’s not just that. I’ve gone for years using Linux as my primary desktop OS and I still felt I had more options available to me than I did on the Mac. Of course, I’m not the average user. I live for things like SSH and hacking out cron job scripts so I look at computers a little differently than most folks.

Recently I was looking at buying a new computer and I seriously was considering a new Mac built on OS X. OS X is layered on top of FreeBSD which for those of you who don’t know is a flavor of Unix (in a general sense). I thought I might be able to feel at home on such a system because I could always bypass all the bells and whistles and get right down to the part of the computing platform that I normally worked in when writing code or playing around.

The reason I didn’t buy a Mac was based on several factors which I’ll outline:

1.Despite the hype you hear about the G5 processor it really doesn’t live up to it if you use anything other than Photoshop. All those performance test were done comparing the G5 to a PC running a very specific program doing some very specific things that the Mac and the Mac version of Photoshop happen to be especially well suited for. If you Google around a bit you’ll even find some very disturbing information about issues with the bus speed of the system that negate any performance increases in the processors.

2. Much like I said before regarding the tendency of Macs to crash, I discovered a pattern of fixes to problems that don’t exist. OS X fixes the crashing problem. But, if you talked to a Mac user prior to OS X, Macs didn’t crash. A recent update fixes the bottleneck problem I described in my previous point but according to Mac users of the previous version of Mac OS X, there was no bottleneck problem. When it comes down to it, you can’t find an unbiased review of the Mac. If it even reeks of being unbiased every Mac site on the Internet will tell you how full of lies it is. It always worries me when someone tells you 1+1 doesn’t equal 2 because of some external factor that only that person knows about.

In fact, a perfect example of this type of clouded comparison is courtesy of O’Reilly which I generally respect for their technical books and articles. Author James Duncan Davidson goes on a love-fest for the newest Mac OS X upgrade to such a point that you almost want to puke. He lists 11 reasons why Mac users should upgrade but as you read through the reasons you’re scratching your head to why Mac users think that the Mac OS X operating system is worthy of such devotion.

Reason #1 ExposéExposés a virtual desktop manager. They’ve had them for years on Linux.

Reason #2 Command-Tab: If you’re on a Windows system and you have more than one application running, hit ALT/TAB. It’s the same thing. If this feature ranks one of the top ten reasons to upgrade from Mac OS X Jaguar to Mac OS X Panther you have to really wonder what all the hype is about.

Reason #3 Threading in Mail: I’m not sure this is a reason to upgrade your OS since threaded email seems to be more of an application level issue but Mr. Davidson thinks it’s the cat’s pajamas.

Reason #4 Fast Preview: If it’s actually as cool as he says it is then it’s a mark in favor of the Mac. I hate having to open a file to preview it.

Reason #5 The New Finder: I’m not even sure what this guy is talking about. Does he mean that shortcuts go where you want them instead of where the Mac OS thinks they should go? I’m sorry, they had that back in Windows 3.x.

Reason #6 Safari Rendering: Another thing that has been part of Windows since Win95. Isn’t that what all of the noise was about with Microsoft? They integrated the browser with the OS so it gave them an unfair advantage over Netscape and other browsers.

Reason #7 Font Book: The Font Book is completely irrelevent unless you do a lot of font switching.

Reason #8 File Vault: uh, yeah, we’ve had that as a utility since who knowns when. Go to the MIT PGP website. And it’s free!

Reason #9 Secure Erase Trash: Same as #8 above.

Reason #10 Active Directory Integration: It integrates with . . . Windows XP and 2000 file systems which if you ran Windows XP or 2000 you wouldn’t need anyway.

Reason #11 Xcode: OS X provides a programming interface for free. Technically, so do Perl, PHP, Python, and a whole host of other languages that run on Windows. Sure, Windows makes you buy extra dev kits to develop in Visual Basic or C# but if you really need to hack around on OS X, why wouldn’t you just learn Perl, Python or PHP which are languages easy to snap into the underlying FreeBSD base that OS X sits on?

When it comes down to it, OS X and the Mac line in general don’t really provide a compelling argument unless you’re a graphic artist or a video editor. Those are the only two places that the Mac has tools that are equal to or superior to those available on a PC (either in Windows or Linux). Everything else is fluff. Believe me, I really, really wanted that task bar in OS X and I think the Aqua theme is really, really cool but I’m currently running a Aqua theme in Linux so I solved half that issue without paying the Apple premium.

I ended up buying a dual proc 800 Mhz system with half a GB of RAM. It was a used server but I only paid $400 for it compared to the $2000+ I would have paid for a simularly powered Mac. I bought the system I did because I’m thinking I don’t really need a monster, state of the art system for about another year or two (when Intel’s next gen of processors come out as well as the next version of Windows) and when I’m ready to upgrade I can always throw my 2U VA Linux recent purchase into a rack at a data center and it can be a backup server.

Do I hate the Mac? No. I think there are better values for the money but I don’t hate an OS or hardware platform. It’s just a computer. Computers are just tools. People who think that buying a computer that Albert Einstien’s family allowed for his likeness to be attached to makes them cool . . . prove they are anything but thinking different.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

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