Bagel Belly Blog

Switcher

No, I wouldn't switch back to i686, even if you paid me.
I spent some time during the GetTogether being the typical sadistic Mac advocate, trying to convince my friends in the Cocoon community to become switchers. I thought it might be useful to set down my reasons here, in a slightly more cohesive fashion than could be delivered at 2am after a skinful of Belgian beer.
So what's so great about life on the Mac?
The first, most obvious thing has to be how little time I now spend worrying about system configuration and maintenance. Yesterday, I saw someone with a linux box struggling to get a wifi connection because they didn't know the SSID. I haven't had to worry about how to get wifi working for almost a year now. I open the laptop, and if there's a connection, I'll be online before I realise it. If it's a new open connection I haven't used before, I'll be asked if I want to connect first. No configuration. No hassle. It just works.
Everything looks much better on a Mac. Outrageously high-quality LCD panels really help - the narrow profit margins on i686 machines seems to lead to cheap, washed-out displays in comparison. And the excellent font handling, the carefully-crafted Aqua eye candy, and the user interface design craftsmanship of just about all Apple developers all add to the deal. I'm staring at this screen for 10-12 hours a day, so it may as well be a pleasure to look at, right?
The biggest killer feature of the Powerbook is the excellent suspend and resume. This single thing has saved me maybe 5 minutes a day, every day, because I don't have to wait for my machine to boot, shutdown, or mess around with a software suspend linux swap partition. And it works - because it's in firmware, it would work whatever I ran on this machine. PC vendors really shot themselves in the foot when they failed to come up with a workable standard or firmware support for this. My oldest laptop from 2000 suspends better than my newest machine from 2003 - because the BIOS handles it and doesn't rely on the operating system. I think this is how it needs to be for it to be reliable.
Power. It's actually a realistic option to stay unplucked from the mains for a couple of hours (right now the status bar says 2hr 34 left), and if you do need to swap batteries, you don't need to shut down. Just suspend the laptop, swap, and carry on. And because of the killer suspend and resume, this really takes under 30 seconds.
Dual monitors. This is actually an area where Windows firmly trounces linux, though obviously the Mac is ahead of them both ;-) Plug another monitor into the Mac, and it just works. The OS is predictable and easy to use with the second monitor, and menus and windows are usually aware of what's going on. Unplug the monitor, and anything on the second desktop is automatically moved onto your main desktop for you. That's how it should work - transparently and obviously.
Speaking of work, the whole Mac GUI has changed the way I do things. I used to be a stickler for having separate tasks on separate desktops - so editor in one, mail in another, browser in a third, etc. These days, I feel perfectly happy with a cluttered desktop covered in windows - exposé and the Dock let me find what I need as quickly as switching desktops. I do still keep 4 desktops open - but I'm slowly coming to find I don't use them.
Software. Two types of software ensure I never want to go back to the linux world. Firstly, I have all of the unix / freeware stuff that I ever used on linux, so there's nothing I'm missing. Secondly, I have professional software like Office, and killer applications like SubEthaEdit. Life without them would be so much poorer. And then in a category of its own is Quicksilver - a true paradigm shift that makes it feel archaic using any machine without it.
Attention to detail and hardware quality is the last thing I'd like to rant about. Yes, there's only one mouse button, but so many other things make up for it. The keyboard on the powerbook is just about the best in the business. The ethernet socket does crazy things like auto-sensing whether it needs to be crossover or not. That's just crazy! It makes other vendors appear stupid and lazy for not including it. The magnetic catch on the lid seems so obvious. The power brick with slot-in sockets for different countries. The heartbeat light on the front that pulses when the machine is asleep. The backlit keyboard. The lights on the battery that tell you the charge, whether it's in the Powerbook or not.
Folks, I'm telling you - the grass really is greener here. You can have this Powerbook when you wrestle it out of my cold, dead hands. Go and buy your own. Now ;-)