It All Just Works, Most of the Time
Apple’s Mac OS X isn’t the sole reason why I am spending all my time on Macs. In fact, it’s OS X, my iPhone, my iTunes music collection, my online MobileMe account, and everything else. It’s the synergy between all these things that make the Mac platform so attractive.
MobileMe has been a bit of a fickle though. Apple hasn’t done a very good job at launching the new service. Album publishing is currently down for some users and Apple’s been trying to work out the kinks for the last two weeks now. Seeing as how there are millions of .mac users and then those who picked up the new iPhone 3G and signed up for MobileMe, Apple should have been better prepared for the launch. Given that I’m on a free trial, it’s not so bad. There are however those who have signed up right away to the $99/year plan and having problematic and in some cases completely offline service, is craptacular to say the least.
Other than MobileMe, Apple’s integration of software and hardware works like a charm. There’s usually very little setup and configuration involved in getting applications to work together — in most cases, you have to enter a few basic credentials and "boom."
Even Apple’s recent app called Remote for the iPhone was such a neat little tool. I always have a small computer connected to my home theater, and I am not always around that unit to control what music is being played. So I’m out on my balcony and controlling iTunes on my Mac using my iPhone — I have to admit, this is all pretty cool and Apple’s done a really good job at bringing everything together in a very harmonious manner. Kudos to that!
Networking across different platforms is also easy. My Macs recognize all my Windows PCs and my Linux systems without a hiccup. Speaking of Linux compatibility, I’m going to be doing a full reinstall of my servers over from a very old RedHat 9 setup to Ubuntu LTS fairly soon. I’ll write an article about this soon and document the install, configuration with iptables, and others.
All minor things aside, things just work well on my Mac. And yes, I can play all my favorite games on my Mac Pro. Although with graphics options lagging behind the Windows PC world, games that are extremely graphics intensive, like Crysis, run rather sluggish. Most games out there play very smoothly though. The good part of all this is that many of the major publishers are starting to really both Windows and Mac versions of games at the same time.
