The Transition
Eventually, I ended up complimenting my single CPU desktop with a small 12-inch PowerBook, which I quickly fell in love with partially due to its size but mainly due to OS X. Not too long after using the 12-inch PowerBook, Apple made the big announcement.
After Apple announced its switch to Intel processors, I was definitely interested. But I’m sure the overall PC community was interested as well. The reason being: everyone was looking forward to hacking the Intel version of OS X to run on generic systems, and getting Windows to run on their Macs. Well, Apple certainly solved the Windows-on-a-Mac issue very effectively with Boot Camp. Virtualization layers such as Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion also attend to this issue very nicely too.
I’ve been using a Core 2 Duo Mac and I don’t think I’ll be going back to my PCs. Oh, wait — I think I will have to go back — so I can tear it down and sell the parts piece by piece.
The truth of the matter is, Apple’s OS X Leopard is so much more efficient at doing my everyday work and musing. Let’s take just simply navigating around the operating system itself. On Windows, I always have to organize my opened windows, but in Leopard, I have Expose and it’s such a snap to use. Compare Expose to Windows Vista’s window management solution, and the efficiency difference is pretty obvious. It’s so easy to get from window to window, it feels almost effortless compared to Windows. Granted, Windows has become better at giving you options to manage tons of windows, but it’s not quite up to the maturity that is Leopard. Although, here’s hoping that we can see some real nice magic from Microsoft in the next major Windows release.
Another cool feature I find myself using so often in Leopard is Spotlight, the built in indexing and searching feature. With Spotlight, you can do mathematical calculations right in the search field without launching Calculator. Spotlight’s defining feature is its speed. I simply type in "fi" and the first result is Firefox — exactly what I had intended to launch. The second result is FileMagnet, which is an utility I use to share files between my Mac and my iPhone. Search results are pretty much instant.
Of course, there are some problems here with Spotlight. If your Mac crashes for some reason, and you have to do a cold reboot, it’ll have to reindex everything again before you’re able to use the search feature. And yes, sometimes my Mac does crash — although it rarely does.
Outside of navigating around the operating system, other features are also so well designed and integrate well. Many devices just seem to work well. Granted the Mac platform is quite closed and there aren’t as many devices for Macs as there are for Windows PCs, but personally, I don’t miss them.