Mac OSX Experiences From The Dark Side

Yes, it’s true. Get over it already. I bought an Apple Macintosh. A 27 inch 2.93Ghz Quad Core i7 with 8GB RAM, 1TB HD, and HD5750-1GB. I understand this has caused several people to exhibit signs of severe confusion because I’m really mostly known as a “Windows Guy” (more appropriately, a .NET guy). For a little while I’ll refrain from posting any pictures, though. Wouldn’t want people to die from either laughter or heart-attacks.

Some people have told me the grass is greener on the other side and that I would eventually switch everything to Mac’s. Others have said that once I touch a Mac I’ll never want to touch Windows again. And I’ve been told that I should be prepared to meet with some archaic ways of doing things combined with suffering a Unix after-taste. I’ve never opposed Unix, Linux, or any variants thereof, though. It’s an acquired taste I’m not unfamiliar with so wasn’t all that concerned about it.

I haven’t touched a Mac since the days of the Mac Quadra (the 950’s in the early days of the first NLE digital video systems from Avid) and the Mac IIce I had for a while. Yes, a very long time ago. Things certainly have changed a little since those days. So now I’ve been getting questions about why I bought a Mac. Guess what, I’m not going to disclose the exact (business) reason(s) but will give you a top 10 that you can pick one or more combinations from:

1. I wanted one of those flat tiny keyboard and got one. The rest of the stuff, like the big monitor, just came with it in the box.
2. As some blogs have reported, Mitch Haile and I are supposedly and allegedly in an all-out office war, buying everything the other buys, like we’ve been doing for many years as some people claim. Recently we discovered, he does Mac’s and I do PC’s so we’ve been doing it all wrong the past years. We’re in the process of fixing that. Thanks for all the helpful hints, guys! I never knew we were doing it wrong! 🙂
3. Shel Holtz recently created an Apple-free life for himself. What he didn’t notice is that it caused a massive imbalance in the universe that had to be corrected before any disasters started to happen, like hurricanes and oil-spills, whoops, ok, I’m probably responsible for the oil-spill… should’ve bought the iMac sooner!
4. I once wanted a smaller digital camera and ended up with enough professional Nikon gear to use as a down-payment on a house. I recently wanted a lighter laptop to travel with and ended up with a monster heaviest-ever Clevo D900F. The other day I went into the Apple store and *this* is what I walked out with. The trend clearly continues.
5. Dennis Klein twisted my arm and forced me to get one!
6. I wanted to get an iPhone but heard the camera was puny and the screen was too small. I asked the people in the store if they had something with a bigger screen and a better camera. The iMac is what I walked out the store with.
7. After much research I decided not to get an iPhone because employees at Foxxcon are experiencing enormously high rates of suicides. I figured it was safer to buy an iMac and use the XCode development tools to simulate apps on the iPhone. Now Foxxcon employees can simulate their suicides.
8. An Apple a day keeps the doctor away?
9. We all know Steve Balmer has a tendency to throw around iPhones and make fun of Macbook Air’s like Guy Kawasaki’s. I needed to avoid him picking up my Mac without benchpressing a few more pounds so decided to get a Mac that is more difficult to throw around.
10. I really needed a machine that runs Windows 7, maybe? 🙂

I had to replace the 10th reason with a new one because the original 10th reason was “because it’s such a nice nearly-Autodesk-free platform”. Except, shortly after I ordered the iMac they decided to announce AutoCAD for the Mac, this after 20 years between releases (a new world record!). So that reason doesn’t fly. To preempt any potential assumptions; this move by Autodesk has absolutely nothing to do with my reasons for getting a Mac, at all, none whatsoever.

OK, so back to the reality again… I’m not sure I will post a lot of discoveries and experimentation results but I’ll title this post as a part 1 just in case I feel compelled to write a part 2, or more. My first observations with the Mac and OSX:

• Various dock applications that were based on the OSX dock have more configuration options than the original ‘real’ dock.
• Nice to see SMB compression push network file transfers to 1.5Gbps (often peaking at 1.7Gbps). Of course, a solid 1Gbps is sustained when files being copied over are already heavily compressed.
• Time machine; nice concept but darn that thing is slow as HECK! I can’t imagine it being useful for real work and large numbers of large files. I’ll be setting up my own sync and backup scrpts and rely on SMB and FTP shares on my network instead.
• XCode actually feels very nice. It’s not Visual Studio and I don’t like the typical Mac style of having windows all over the desktop but it feels solid and quite complete. I was pleasantly surprised since I expected the OSX development tools to be more archaic and draconic. In a way they are but not nearly as bad as I feared. Getting up and running with it was very easy. I already prefer to work with the XCode 4 beta (but I’m not supposed to ramble about that, I believe).
• I really like XCode’s snapshot feature. I often find myself making experimental changes to code (without recording those changes in any SCM). The fact that it is integrated with a diff view is great. When using Visual Studio I have external workarounds to accomplish the same thing but having it right in the IDE is, well, real nice!
• They say working on an Apple Macintosh, with OSX, makes you feel real good. While I can neither confirm nor deny that I must say the feeling of using XCode Instruments to track a few zombies that were the result of some stupid use of autorelease felt… great!
• To conclude, after a little experimentation I admit that there’s a lot of interesting and nice features about OSX but not enough to make me ‘a convert’ (not that there was any chance of that in the first place, though even while it was funny to mess with people’s heads as they learned that I decided to put my hands on a Mac).

Disclaimer: No Mac’s were harmed in the process of experimentation!
You can see images of the new additions to the Home Office in another blog post.