I decided to jump on the bandwagon in May and purchased an iMac as a replacement for one of my PCs. While I was not expecting an epiphany I must say I am a little underwhelmed by the experience. Apart from the small differences in mouse use and where to look for menus I have really not found it any different from a windows PC, and definitely quite similar in feel to my KDE desktop. I guess I expected to be more impressed with my experience.
Image courtesy of Apple
So far the Mac has been justifying the main reason I purchased it admirably so far. The PC it replaced was the family one and even with anti-virus software I was still finding myself cleaning out some sort of trojan or malware every few months. After 3 months I have had to do zero maintenance on the Mac, so in that regard I am pleased.
Most of the actual issues I have with the platform probably relate more to my experience level than any inherent problem, for instance OpenOffice is still not running as well as I would like. I am also not that impressed with Safari even though v4 is a definite improvement (I see a Firefox install in the near future).
What I do really like is the quality of the design. The only cable involved is power and it looks good enough that I am considering moving it out into the family area. The one bundled app I have fallen in love with though is iPhoto, especially the face recognition feature. I haven’t found the photo editing any better though.
While I am not dissapointed in the Mac, it has not impressed me enough to change my main system from a Windows/Linux machine. If any of the experienced Mac hands out there have any suggestions on how to improve the taste of the kool-aid please send them in. As long as the box stays trojan free it will remain appreciated.
A couple of years ago, before I got my latest Dell laptop, I complained rather vocally about Windows automatic updates occurring even though I’d turned off the option for automatic updating. I tend to leave my laptop (or whatever I’m using as my primary machine at the time) running 24/7, connected to the ‘net. I’ve done this for my own convenience, as I schedule midnight backups to the ‘net so that my daily work isn’t affected. There would be times when I’d get up in the morning and head to my laptop (a Gateway Tablet) and find it had rebooted itself. In trying to figure out what was going on, I realized pretty quickly that Windows was pushing updates that did not honor my choice to not install automatically. This annoyed me greatly, for many reasons. Because of the tablet operating system, certain IE updates would crash the tablet function, and I would have to laboriously remove each individual patch until I got the tablet to work again the way it was supposed to.
