It’s a statement that I knew I’d have to make eventually, but I didn’t think I’d be doing so quite so soon.  Not for a number of years, actually.  I’ve written a couple of articles previously on this subject:  the first, What is stopping me getting a Mac started off from a rather frosty position towards the Mac, with my second article Considering a Mac (an update) taking a bit of a softened stance, leaving this, my third article charting my total conversion.  Sceptical to converted in just three articles?  Not bad eh?

I’ve needed a new desktop computer for quite some time now.  My desktop is an old warhorse by today’s standards: a battle-scarred six-year-old PC running Windows XP that has already seen its glory years and is heading into graceful retirement as we speak.  My laptop is a four-year-old Dell running Windows Vista, but it’s seriously running out of hard disk space, and is starting to run sluggishly.

It wasn’t pretty

So what did I replace them with?  Initially, a £600 HP slimline tower running the latest and greatest: Windows 7.  It should have been a fantastic experience: 4GB of RAM, a quad-core AMD processor, a decent graphics card, and 64-bit Windows 7 all hooked up to a gorgeous 24 inch Samsung tv monitor.  It was awful.  If I left the computer running for a while and left it too its own devices, on my return it freely admitted to me that not only had it crashed, it had blue-screened on me.  My face went grey.  Over the following days it repeatedly blue-screened on as many occassions as it possibly could.  When it didn’t crash, it froze.  Firefox?  That too was either crashing or freezing on me too.  Not even my iPod touch was spared: its data was corrupted, and it had to be recovered hooked up to my laptop where my new computer couldn’t hurt it.

I’d had enough.  I went back to Currys and got my money back.  I needed to get what I trully deserved.  I needed to get a Mac.  I would imagine this is how quite a few PC owners become Mac owners.  And I must say, that I feel quite bewildered at where I find myself right now.  Sure, Macs are expensive and you pay a hefty premium for them, but then you realise what you’ve left behind.  It feels worth it.  All as I need to wait for now is delivery!

I’m going to need a favour

As I’m totally new to this whole Mac business, I’m going to need a few pointers.  Can anyone recommend any best practices for using a Mac?  And are there any must-have apps that I’m going to need?  Cheers in advance!

One of the major themes from my last post was my continuing attachment to PC games, such as the Age of Empires series, The Sims, Half-Life 2 etc.  Scarily, there’s a part in my last post where I mention ‘maybe PC games won’t mean so much to me in a few years time‘.  That may have already come to pass.  I’ve been using a laptop over the past couple of years due to my Uni work, and especially since my main desktop computer had its second hard drive failure.  This has meant, one way or another, that I’ve had to put my enjoyment of PC games out to pasture.

I think the remaining arguments against getting a Mac for me remain: value for money, reliability, and usability.  I’ll take each topic in turn, and you’ll see how I end up at each conclusion.  I welcome any comments to this post to further aid my decision (or make my decision harder as the case may be!).  Note that I’m comparing Macs against computers running Windows.

Value for money

I’m going to attack this topic head on.  Macs simply cost more than their Windows counterparts.  It’s just a fact.  Whilst the Macs close the gap somewhat in price, the MacBooks are ridiculously expensive.  It’s my opinion that you’re paying for the design and the brand.  Take a good pair of jeans for example: many shops will try and flog me a pair for between £60-£100!  I take a different approach and by not paying for a pair of Levi’s or whatever, I pay a much more reasonable price of £20 for a good pair of jeans.

How on earth am I comparing jeasns to Macs?  Well, I would like a nice, powerful laptop, but the only MacBook that meets my criteria is an aluminium one costing £929.00 (at my last check on the UK Apple Store).  What has been a revalation for me though, teetering on the brink of buying a Mac, is that my brother snagged himself a top-of-the-range HP laptop for just over £500.  I’m sorry, but for value, the Mac doesn’t even come close.

Addressing previous comments on the previous post regarding value, I’d say the only programs I pay for every time are Photoshop Elements and Microsoft Office, of which a good proportion of Mac users will probably buy as well.  As for anti-virus, please- I use AVG Free which is lightweight, and does the job.  Check Wakoopa for my software usage.

So to sum up how I see the value proposition of the Mac, I don’t have anything against the Mac per se.  Heck if I were to win a Mac for free or be the beneficiary of some kind Mac donor, then sure, I could be a convert.  Yet as a fairly broke student I sure as heck ain’t paying over the odds for the prililedge to run a Mac.  I just can’t justify spending that sort of money.

Reliability

Sure, Macs are way more reliable than any Windows machine you’re likely to come across.  I’ll concede this point because it is absolutely true.  I mean, as Apple controls both the software and the hardware, there’s really no excuses for any loss of stability or reliability on a Mac.  Yet the great redeeming feature of Windows computers is choice.  Choice drives down prices and opens up new configuration possibilities.  And yes, this is where the trade-off comes in: In order to benefit from lower prices and for there to be compatibility with such a wide range of software and hardware, stability and reliability suffers.

To be honest, most of the major failures I’ve had to date have been through hard disk failure which is most definitely the fault of the hardware.  I think it was only a copy of Windows 98 SE that went corrupt on me.  Windows XP has been mostly fine, yet over the years I have had my fair share of crashes and blue screens of death with it.

Windows Vista on the other hand, is a different beast.  I can’t say I can remember it ever having crashed on me due to its own fault.  The only time I’ve had system failure on my laptop (my only Vista machine) has been due to over heating.  So yea, Vista has given me all the reliability and stability I’ve ever wanted.  Seeing Vista on my brother’s new HP laptop as well is a thing of beauty.  It all just works.

Usability

For this juncture, I direct you to a couple of articles to read before continuing:

• Paradigms lost: The Windows 7 Taskbar versus the OS X Dock, a very detailed and in-depth look by Ars Technica at the similarities on the surface, but the deep and fundamental differences between the OSes.
• Windows 7: Simple vs. Easy, an excellent article by Paul Thurrott of the Supersite for Windows from the perspective of Windows users and their difficulty with practically adapting to the Mac OS X way of doing things.

If you’ve read this far, then I commend you as those articles alone take perhaps a good half hour to read in their entirety.  I’ve had the good fortune to actually use Mac OS X first-hand when I had a job as a network troubleshooter for the University.  Sure it’s different, and quite a shock to the system as a Windows user for many years.  Conceptually, both systems make sense in their own way, yet each have their own little quirks.

Particularly after reading the article by Ars Technica, not only have I been able to fully understand why Mac OS X does what it does, but now I’m not even sure if I like the way it handles programs and windows.  To me, personally, Windows makes more sense.

Sitting on the fence

In contrast to my previous post on this subject which could have been construed as neutral or even possibly pro-Mac, this post may have come as a bit of a shock!  Admittedly, I didn’t start out writing this post as so anti-Mac, but I’ve had lingering doubts about the Mac platform for a few months now.  I suppose this is how those thoughts have manifested!  However I feel that it is best if my thoughts are out in the open, and any finer points about what I’ve mentioned can be discussed.

You may not believe it, but I’m still on the fence when it comes down to making a decision either way.  Out of the three main topics that I covered, price still seems to be the decisive factor.  Macs may be a personal indulgence or preference for people who can simply bill them as a business expense or who are in a high-flying job, but as far as I’m concerned they remain out of the reach of the ordinary, humble user.

Let’s rewind to 2006, shall we?  Windows Media Player 11 was released and it debuted with a new visual look, which was nice.  Anyhow, the most important feature that made its debut was being able to view album art when looking for music: by album, by artist.. etc.  A very useful and handy feature indeed.  I had occasionally dabbled with iTunes here and there, but I hated its sluggish behaviour in Windows, and I didn’t particularly like viewing lists.  Windows Media Player 11 was truly the hub of my music experience.  That, and the fact I was using a Creative Zen Micro 6Gb MP3 player.  It all worked really well.

The same iTunes we all know and love

For some reason I thought I wouldn’t go with the rest of the herd (being a non-conformist), and I’d hold off on getting an iPod, especially as they used to be a bit expensive.  Yet as the years went by, I grew increasinly envious of people who had iPods.  They looked so cool, and everything just worked!  So I took the plunge and bought a black 8Gb iPod Nano (3rd generation) for my 20th birthday.  I haven’t looked back since.  What I still hated though, were the lists in iTunes.  I wasn’t a big fan of coverflow either as it always slowed my pc down!

The new grid view for album artwork

Now comes iTunes 8, with the same album art feature that debuted in Media player 11 two years ago.  That’s no bad thing, maybe, but I’m surprised it’s taken Apple this long to implement it.  I digress though, iTunes now works exactly as I want it; I’ve got my albums arranged by artist and it looks sweet.  iTunes itself feels faster in Windows, which is good.  To top it all off, intelligent playlists are a stroke of Genius, pardon the pun!

A Genius playlist

So, to conclude this article of sorts I suppose I feel that the iTunes program is starting to mature with mostly spit and polish to add.  Then again, who knows what the future may hold?

Sooo… I’m expanding my network at home.  I have one wireless router and ADSL modem giving me some internet goodness and now it has a little baby brother; a wired router.  All of this is to manage and connect three wired connections to desktop PCs throughout the house, with the network wirelessly connecting a laptop, a PS3 and two PSPs.  Phew!  However I want the option of connecting my PS3 though to the wired network.  I also want the capacity to add network printing and network attached storage in future.

(NB.  If you want to know what type of network I have, I tell you- it’s a star network.)