Windows v MAC (Part 2)

My honeymoon period with the MAC is officially over as I have used it extensively enough to find out it's ins and outs.

What do I think of it for the everyday?

It's better than Windows in one key area - productivity. Since owning the MAC, all work I have done at home has been infinitely more productive than it ever was using a PC. My MACBook hasn't crashed, frozen, stopped when loading an application. It just works, it's quicker booting and shutting down and applications seem to be more intuitive.

I have used Office 2004 for most of my work and it is - in my opinion - better and easier to use than any version of Office on the PC prior to 2007. My company uses and trains people in Microsoft Office rather than any other solution as it really is a standard - admittedly OpenOffice and NEOOffice it's MAC equivalent are mighty close, and iWork 08 is also very good (Keynote thrashes Powerpoint for effectiveness of presentations - and porting files from one system to another was effortless.

The MACBook keyboard also deserves a special mention, this is outstanding, there are less keys than a Windows keyboard and there are gaps between them, at first sight you think WTF, yet it is actually easier to use and nowhere near as cramped as a PC keyboard.

Managing multiple Windows is also better as hitting F9 expands your desktop and shows you all the windows at once and you can click the one you are after. Again this is far superior to Windows.

I think the biggest thing about using the MAC for me though is that it is like a holiday, I can still go home and be enthusiastic about using the computer. I thought at first it was just because it was different from Windows, yet it turned out to be that I was actually enjoying it because it was better, everything about the MAC is better, except perhaps two things: Games and quantity of applications, the first one I realised I didn't miss at all as since having kids I have been playing consoles more, and liking them more, HALO on XBOX is far better for me on the console than on the PC, same with Half-Life 2 and if I was that desperate I would use Parallels or Crossover and run the PC version. Quantity of applications also isn't an issue really either, no there isn't as much available as with Windows and certainly not as much as Linux, yet the quality is better, so you don't need as much, for example Adium the instant messenger works with every messaging system out there including MSN and AOL. Additionally you can run a lot of Linux applications using Apples X11 interface.

The downsides to the MAC if there are any, are really issues I have with Apple. Just as with Microsoft, Apple links some of it's system in with paid content, this is truthfully less evident with Microsoft but Apple flagrantly try and make you pay roughly $80 a year to have a .Mac account, the reason for this is to allow the iLife applications to publish content seamlessly, however, and perhaps I'm just British and tight, but $80 is just too much, especially when it used to be offered free and without it, it renders iChat inoperable. The other thing is that iTunes, which I personally find a bit weird won't let you convert downloaded music to any other format that the proprietry MP4 format, on Windows and Linux there are ways around this but the MAC is short of free options and I'm not buying an iPod.

Outside of this though the MAC is great even my better half likes them now, can't say much more than that!