Black As My Soul: I Bought a Mac

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November 20, 2005

I Bought a Mac

I didn't necessarily plan to do it… But I had enough trouble with Windows and iTunes that I thought it was worth experimenting with another platform.

After having it up and running for a few days, I'm reasonably happy with it. It's not going to be my main computer. Not yet. There are a few too many PC applications that I would have to switch from and that's pretty painful, but I still know enough about Macs to cause trouble. And I'm learning again how nicely done the operating system is.

I'm not saying I'm gonna switch. I was tempted at first, but I have run into basically every issue with iTunes and synching my iPod that I had on the windows platfor, save two. First, iTunes hasn't just spontaneously quit on me as I had happen with some frequency on Windows. And I also have not had any spontaneous rebooting like my Windows server box would do.

Causes for joy? Yeah, a couple. Connecting an external firewire drive was faster and simpler than in Windows. It only took a few moments rather than the minute it would have taken Windows to notice a new device then scan through the massive driver database to figure out what it was. Strict control over hardware does have its benefits.

The thing that really, really impressed me was that the little Mac Mini knew how to connect to my Windows 2003 Active Directory domain. I copied over a hundred gigs of MP3s from my Windows server. The connection never failed. It just worked. I'm certain that doing that with a pair of Windows boxes would not have worked as well. In my experience, large copying sessions almost always hang for one reason or another. Fortunately for me this was not the case and I was really glad for it.

I still have some experimenting to do. I want to see how well it handles connecting to a digital camera, and how well the included iPhoto software is at minor image editing.

It's easy to see why people are so fond of Macs. I like mine.

But I'm still not giving up my sleek Sony Vaio laptop. Hell no.

[+] Posted by Sinner, who was transgressing at the time (November 20, 2005 10:29 PM) by revealing evil. [+]