Glad to be back on a Mac
Saturday, March 1, 2008 The Apple Store in Regent Street is a few hundred yards from our London office. On Wednesday I popped in to buy the new MacBook Air. They were sold out. Fortunately John Lewis is just around the corner. I got the last one before they too were out of stock.
When I got home it took two minutes to set up and connect "the world's thinnest laptop" to the internet via our BT Home Hub. Two years ago it took several days - and numerous pleas for technical help from a call centre in India - before I could connect my old PC laptop to the same wi-fi network.
A lot has changed - notably the operating system - in the five years since I last worked on a Mac, but a Mac is still a Mac. And if you're one of those crass, insensitive people who say, "It's still just a computer", you're wrong. That's like saying a BMW 3-series is just a car. It's not. In its class, it's a great car.
I stopped using Macs because I was no longer editing and designing magazines and - crucially - the content management system on the Forest website was not Mac compatible. Thankfully, the CMS on the new site - to be launched next month - is compatible, hence my return to the fold.
Next week I may even treat myself to an iMac so we can make (and edit) videos for the new site. Happy days.
Reader Comments (2)
"And if you're one of those crass, insensitive people who say, "It's still just a computer", you're wrong. That's like saying a BMW 3-series is just a car. It's not. In its class, it's a great car."
Errr but it's just an Intel Core-Duo with probably an ATI Radeon and some DDR memory. It is just a PC, in fact it will run Windows, or it is will run Linux, hell you could even probably run BeOS on it if you were really sick. The analogy to a BMW 3-Series is nonsense at a technical level, it's just an ordinary PC like an HP laptop running a Unix BSD-based kernel, an X server. In fact, you could have bought even better spec from another brand and slapped OSX on that instead. If you're going to make an analogy with a car then it's just a kit car.
Glad to see you are back on to Macs - if there's one thing I hated about my eight years in the Scottish Parliament it was their reliance on bloody PCs. That's why I worked at home so often - and they refused to get wi-fi that would allow people like me to at least have connectivity inside the parliament. I use a 15" MacBook Pro and swear by it - it's been all round the world with me a couple of times over and has never let me down. The only problem I had was with the battery eventually giving up after two years - but then I run it practically 24/7 so it takes a fair battering.
I already have an i-Mac and swear by that too - but the new ones are even better than the first generation that I got two years ago (or was it three?). Still, my MacBook Pro can do EVERYTHING that the i-Mac does.
I've been on Macs since 1987, My sons have them and all my businesses have used them. If there's one thing that exceptional it is the low maintenance costs due to the hardware and software reliability.
If there's one annoying thing it's how some companies - even large behemoths such as BT - are slow to make their system upgrades compatabile with Mac system software such as Safari. A short-sighted approach which simply means I avoid doing business with suppliers such as BT.
As for the car analogy criticised in the first comment - it's not the components that make a Mac superior (although better components maketh a better computer) it's the COMBINATION of the operating system, the design AND the components. Comparing the Mac Air to a BMW kit car is to say the Bentley is just a Volkswagen in kit car, or the Jaguar XJ series a Ford in disguise - which would be as crass as the comment above.