Gadgets & Gear: September 2009

Anyone who knows me or has read this column for the last several years knows that I have never been a big fan of Apple. Though if you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed that my anti-Mac / anti-iPod stance has softened significantly over the last year or so.

In fact, I have pretty much said in this column that there really is no reason for you to have an MP3 player that is not an iPod. As I’ve said in the past, it was never because I thought that Apple made bad products, but that I never really bought in to their ‘I’m cool because I have a Mac/iPod’ conceit. But now things have taken a radical change…

I’ve officially gone to the Dark Side.

Not only do I have an iPod, but also the iPhone, and now I have replaced all of my computers (two laptops and one desktop) with Macs. It was a slow process at first, kind of like the Emperor from Star Wars whispering little things in Anakin Skywalker’s ear that started him down the path towards becoming Darth Vader.

First, my wife got an iPod Nano for Christmas a few years back which I had to set up for her since she didn’t know how, and I noticed how nice it was to navigate and use (though iTunes still sucked on PCs at the time). That led to me buying an iPod Shuffle for myself, which is still my favorite little music player.

Later I bought the iPod Touch when it first came out, then early this year I bought iPhones for both of us. Finally, after heading back to school to start my Masters degree, I was tempted by all the Macs I saw around me in class and so I bought MacBooks for my wife and I. It took three weeks of using my MacBook to convince me to ditch PCs forever and that is when I chucked my 2-year-old PC for a sleek new 24” iMac.

And I’m never looking back.

I thought I might miss that old computer system that I have been using since I was a little kid and ran on BASIC or the earliest versions of Windows, but I really don’t.

The ease of use of these Macs is just amazing. Loading programs takes just the time to transfer the data off the disk to the hard drive and doesn’t require writing entries to a registry and all that junk. Uninstalling a program just requires that I drag the icon to the trash bin and it is gone! I spent two days cleaning up my old PC to give to a family friend mostly because all the programs took FOREVER to install/uninstall with numerous re-boots all the time. Every hassle that I have had with my Mac has usually been because I was trying to make things more difficult than they really were; in other words, I was trying to do them the Windows way instead of the Mac way.

Now granted, many of my original arguments against Apple/Macs still stand. Want to upgrade your iMac or MacBook? Grab a sledgehammer, destroy the old one, and then go buy a new one (it’ll be easier that way). Want to buy accessories for your Mac? Be prepared to pay the Apple Tax, which inexplicably adds about 20-40% to the price of an equivalent piece of equipment for a PC. And I would still argue that if Microsoft only had to design a software package for a single design spec like Apple, they could make something that works just as well as the stuff from the geniuses at One Infinity Way. They probably wouldn’t be as slick looking (though the new Zune HD from Microsoft shows that they can make an incredibly slick device when they want), but I guarantee you Windows would work better if they didn’t have to make it work on thousands of different computer configurations.

I have gone from being a naysayer to an advocate with all the fervor of a convert! There isn’t enough time for me to write about all the little things that I love about my Macs, but I can sum them up with just a simple phrase: THEY JUST WORK.

Like I stated earlier, doing things on a Mac is much more straightforward than anything on a PC. All the little maintenance things that I had to do to keep my Windows Operating System from eating itself alive to all the little back-door workarounds to get something to work are no longer needed. One of the biggest knocks on Macs by ‘power users’ of Windows systems, is that they don’t feel that they have enough access to the system for their taste. While it is true that many of the things that Windows users are used to ‘tweaking’, are a little more deeply buried, they are still there if you know where to look. The beauty is though, you don’t have to use them.

I was a ‘power user’ myself and I knew tons of little tricks to make Windows work smoother, but I haven’t really missed not having to do that. It is almost like going from a manual to an automatic transmission, I can focus less on getting the car to move and focus more on driving (but there will always be those who don’t feel they are really driving unless they are in a stick-shift).

There are a couple other ‘drawbacks’ to the Mac compared to the PC in addition to the ones mentioned above, and those would be a relative lack of software and very little support for gaming. There are some software packages that only run on Windows and if you need one of those programs, you probably will not want to switch to a Mac. You can always load Windows on a Mac using Boot Camp, which comes already installed, and run Windows on your Mac when you need it, or better yet use a program like Parallels or VMware Fusion to run Windows (in a window, go figure) on your Mac.

If you are a big gamer on your PC, you are going to be sorely disappointed in the quantity and quality of the games available for the Mac. Sure you can play The Sims 3, but forget about a bunch of the Massively Multiplayer Online games or a lot of the shooters (though they do have Call of Duty: Modern Warfare which is arguably the best shooter of all time).

If you are worried about the compatibility of files for going between work and home, you can always get Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, which I personally believe is the best version of Office I have ever used, and I have been using Office from day 1. It beats the snot out of that abomination they call Office 2007 on the PC.

So there you have it from the man who swore he would never ever give Steve Jobs a single red cent of his money. I have gone to being one of Apple’s biggest supporters. Do yourself a favor and just go play with some of the computers at your local Apple store. Sure, you may not recognize where everything is at first, but the learning curve for Apple products is significantly easier than the PC one.

So if Apple is the Dark Side, and Steve Jobs is the Emperor, I guess that would kind of make me like Darth Vader…

I’m cool with that (as you can see from the picture below).

As always, if you have a gadget you would like me to review or some techie question you would like answered, feel free to email me at: jeff@healthandleisureonline.com.