Jeremy’s World

Well it has been just under six months now since I got myself my first MacBook from the UNSW Apple store in Sydney, Australia.  And the verdict is…

WOW!

Prior to the purchase of this Mac, I had only previously used Macs on two occasions:  during a work experience week in Year 10 at school at MCSU UNSW with a long-time Mac user and before that in Year 4 in primary school using the very ancient Apple II where I played a game which was a cross between multiplication table exercises and an alien space ship shooter.

Having been a long-time Windows user and a recent convert to Linux as a result of my studies, I was at first quite sceptical about Mac OS X (especially having heard some serious disaster stories with OS 10 and 10.1).  Of course with the huge press hype and the move an x86 based system, as well as recent successes with the iPod, the Apple brand caught my attention again.  I also noticed that many of my computer science lecturers were beginning to use Macs to present their lectures.  This made me start to wonder what all the fuss was about - if more and more computer science educators are using Macs over Windows-based machines… there must be a reason.

So, I jumped online and had a look at the Apple website - more specifically at the OS X section of the site and to my surprise I found that Apple was going to release a new version of the system near the end of the year, OS X 10.5 or more commonly known as Leopard.  Having looked at the range of features packed into the system I was thoroughly impressed.  I decided to do some more research and find out about the guts of the OS.  To my surprise it was a melange of some of the best (and sometimes worst) parts of unix-based operating systems with a Mach kernel thrown in on the side for interest.

Having debated for a month inside my head on the investment (although I had already probably decided after about two days) I went and got myself a Mac.  And here I am nearly six months later, using the very same Mac and happily impressed.

This single post would not be enough to my summarise all my loves and hates of Leopard (I’ll do that another time), however in brief the best things I find about the Mac operating system are:

• You get simplicity in the applications, yet can still have enough control of your machine thanks in part to the unix-like kernel and the supposedly much improved terminal interface.
• Much of the software is open source and based on long-standing, well developed software systems which have been a part of unix for well over two decades.
• You don’t suffer as badly from the bane of badware, adware, trojans, worms, viruses, malware and other crap that seems to infest Windows based systems.
• You get the beautiful Quartz interface which is simply a delight to work with
• and… It’s not Vista!

Of course a few pet hates:

• Java is not particularly great on the Mac yet… hopefully that will change soon… but as a developer it is a bit of a pain in the ass
• Productivity software has come a long way and with the release of MS Office 2008, things have improved, but it is still lacking in a few areas as my dad pointed out well… for example users of EndNote still don’t have the support they need to use a Mac (i.e. the software!)

But overall, so far the Mac gets a solid 9/10 from me.  It doesn’t quite get a 10 simply because nothing can be perfect (although the Mac is getting there).  If I were recommending a system to buy for a new or experienced computer user, I would definitely rate a Mac as my first choice now, especially since most Windows based machines are released with Vista nowadays - c’est dommage!

Apple… please keep up the good work!  And let’s not see security suffer in the process of striving for ease of use and compatability (hint to Microsoft).