Image by markhoekstra
Let me start by saying I love Ubuntu. I love how I can change it, how I can bend it to my will, how I can make it look like anything I want. I love how it doesn’t assume it knows best what I like- I am free to make that decision myself, even if it is ugly to others. That said, lately I have been seriously thinking of getting a mac again. The reason mostly has to do with the new job: I’m a designer again, no longer just doodling. I want to be able to run photoshop and other design apps on my computer. Yes, I have all the open source apps. I adore some of them (InkScape in particular) but they just aren’t enough. There’s also the font issue on Ubuntu. I wish adobe made things for Ubuntu. I would buy them. But they don’t. (And before you say anything, I have TRIED running them through WINE. It just isn’t good enough.)
Why NOT get a mac, you may ask? (I can HEAR the mac addicts asking it preemptively.)
Here’s the short list:
Price
This is far and away the biggest reason. You can get a computer with much the same specs as a new mac for less than half the cost. It’s not just the computer- everything is expensive: adapters, spare parts, getting it fixed. Price is by far the biggest consideration, because although I have a new job, I am not rich by any means. I’m also very concerned about saving for retirement, so I take out a large chunk of money out of every paycheck, which doesn’t leave me with a lot.
I have owned a mac before, one of the old imac’s. At the time I bought it, it was comparable in price to other computers with similar power-a bit more, but not that much. Now it is NOT EVEN CLOSE.
Image by Mendhak
And in this category of price, there’s just the fact that Apple, Inc. seems to assume that its customers all have endless wallets and are willing to pay top dollar for anything and everything apple branded. There’s the fact that user replaceable batteries will soon be a thing of the past as far as Apple is concerned, and every update to everything costs something. I suppose it’s worked for them, but for someone without endless money or endless enthusiasm for all things apple, it’s just annoying.
Little OS annoyances
No right click. Different keyboard shortcuts. No print screen button. These are the things that are annoying learning any OS, but it’s still enough of a barrier.
Don’t like any of the models
image by Kia storm =(^.^)= PetoMarmitta & friends
What I really want is a nice tower. But those start at $2700. Ack. The iMacs are nice looking, but I really dislike all in one units (my last iMac monitor went bad, and replacing it would have been half the price of the machine.) the mac mini’s aren’t very upgradeable and don’t have a lot of power. That leaves the macbook, which is OK, but I have the same problems with it as any other all in one.
The Good
So by now you may be asking “If you hate Mac so much, why even consider getting one?” I don’t actually hate Mac’s, I just prefer Ubuntu, and am sad I might not be able to stay with it (at least not completely- I would likely run parallels and/or dual boot Ubuntu if I got a mac and keep severl Ubuntu machines). But why Mac over a Windows computer, given the price? The main reason is that it is Unix based. I have been learning how to write bash files, etc, and I really don’t want to relearn how to do this stuff on a PC. Also, by staying with Unix, I can more easily make the leap back to Ubuntu if, say, Adobe released the programs I need for it (a distant possibility to be sure, but hey, you never know.)
I also must admit, I do love the programs in the iLife suite. iMovie is just fun to use. Garage Band looks fun too.
In any case, nothing will happen for a while – we’re looking at houses (again) and saving every penny for a down payment. And I have not made up my mind yet. Feel free to try and convince me one way or the other.
January 13, 2009
- I right click all the live-long-day on my mac.
- The latest version of OSX lets you remap your keyboard to use whatever keyboard shortcuts you desire.
- There is a keyboard shortcut to get a screenshot. And if you’d like you can map it to a single F-key.
- I hear you on the price point, but in my experience you get what you pay for with PCs, PERIOD. Even if you build from scratch.
January 13, 2009
Chris – do the new macbooks have a rightclick button built in? I HATE Control clicking.
January 13, 2009
Control clicking is unnecessary on the Mac laptops – you just click the touchpad with two fingers. Also works if you run Windows. The multi-touch touchpads are fantastic! I was worried when I switched from the trackpoint on my old Thinkpad (which I loved!) but I have not looked back at all. Right-clicking, scrolling, zooming – it is all very intuitive and unobtrusive.
January 13, 2009
I long held the right click thing against Apple – simplicity is one thing, but a whole 2 buttons doesn’t make a PC mouse the cockpit of a Cessna. The more modern notebooks (I think) and the mightymouse-type mice have a right click capability that work as you’d expect them to – the software supporting it, well, that’s another story. Adobe’s does, everything else is hit or miss. For my work, the little cat-nipple mightymouse has quelled my rage.
I do GUI design on my work Mac Pro all day, and I have learned “the claw” for screen capturing. 4 keys held down simultaneously to do a region->clipboard screen cap. That’s right, four. Even the simple grab-everything shortcut is complex – I haven’t tried remapping them as Chris suggests because that seems so anti-MacOS. Nonetheless, I’ve adapted.
My work thankfully furnished my beast of a Mac tower, and my phone is the only Apple product I’ve ever actually bought myself. I will say on the matter of price, though, I agree that you get what you pay for, but only to a certain threshhold. I had a Compaq budget laptop, and it behaved like a third tier brand budget laptop. I now have a top of the line Dell (who I always resisted, just because they were so prominent) and it is an absolute joy to use and a speed demon – and was two thousand dollars less than an equivalent MacBook.
You get what you pay for between a 600 dollar laptop and an 1100 dollar laptop, but once you get past 1300 your dollars are getting diminishing returns, and you’re paying for marketing.
And on a final note, while MacOS X is quite good, don’t buy too deeply into the hype. I’ve been at my job just over a year, and my Mac Pro has kernel panicked or beachballed more than a cumulative total of 3 Vista machines at home (desktop, old laptop, new laptop) have bluescreened over the course of 2 years plus.
January 13, 2009
Finn Arne – ah, OK. the Macbook I use @ work doesn’t have that feature, I don’t think. I do love the new mac trackpads, though. Multi gestures and big trackpads are the way to go.
January 14, 2009
Excellent post, describes many of my feelings towards Apple as well.
I’m not sure if this matters, but you might be able to run your UNIX shell scripts using Cygwin on Windows. Cygwin also has a built in fun little package management system that lets you install and use some of the UNIX command line utilities you’re used to, rather than dealing with the Windows ones. Although from what I hear, Powershell might be worthwhile to look into if you ever really want to do Windows scripting.