Quote: "I thought Mac OS is for 'simple' minded people? If that's true, why would you, a self-acclaimed computer geek, want to use it?"
The beauty of Mac OS X (
not OS 9, et. al), is that it easily satisfies both the "simple-minded" and the tech savvy tweakhead.
My own reasons:
1.
MacPorts - Automaticallly compiles, links and installs awesome *Nix command line tools and X11/Qt/GTK apps without sacrificing the friendly consumer-oriented GUI. It's true that many projects have Windows ports, but not all of them. Plus, having the code compiled on your own machine allows it to compile with configurations that are optimized for your system.
2. The Terminal
Command Prompt in Windows is just a heaping pile of fail. Windows should have had something like the bash shell a long time ago. Lucky for us, Vista and Win7 come with PowerShell.
Does this contradict my argument? Why, no! Boot camp allows me to enjoy both bash and PowerShell equally.
3. Following that, because bash and other components of *nix are so well documented online, it's easy to learn how to do something like make a cron job that executes a shell script that runs Google Contact Sync once a day.
4. I wanted to learn Ruby this summer. Everyone's talking about it, so I found an online tutorial. Because Mac is *nix, I already had Ruby 1.8.6 installed on my system. Same went for Python 2.6. Turns out I had 64 bit Python2.6 installed (since I'm running Snow Leopard), which isn't compatible with wxPython. No problem, Apple put in an environment variable and a .plist preference that lets you specify to run Python2.6 in 32 or 64 bit mode.
5. Mac uses standard Unix line endings. I would like to know who at Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to use a 2-byte newline sequence. Notepad would be an amazing program if only it knew how to read Unix-style line endings. And, we wouldn't have to make special configurations on source control repos and their clients convert between LF and CRLF depending on who's checking what out.
Recently I was using PyDev with Eclipse on Windows, and because of this CRLF issue and a glitch in Eclipse's console, Python3.1's builtin input() command kept on reading the extra '\r' character and messing up the input logic. I had to manually override builtin.input() to return builtin.input().rstrip('\r').
Thank god for Notepad2.
6. Built-in virtual MIDI cable (it just works
). I'm a composer. Sometimes I'd like to spontaneously hook up Sibelius to Pro Tools to Logic to EastWest Play and send that out to my keyboard. The IAC Driver lets me do that, and it came with the operating system. Just try doing a clean install of a virtual driver on a Windows machine that's seen any sort of serious use. The process won't be nearly as smooth.
7. The Core Audio drivers rarely give me any latency issues. I have not had as much luck with ASIO/Digidesign DAE drivers on Windows. This is another "it just works" situation, but the fact that "it just works" gives me the freedom to do more geeky things with it.
8. I like Logic Pro. The Environment editor is really cool and really powerful. Logic Pro, being an Apple product, is not available on Windows.
9. It's
pretty. I don't think it's wrong to like pretty things.
So you understand that I'm not a Mac fanboy, here's what's wrong with Mac:
1. The X11 icon shows up in the dock when you run an X11 application. Developers have to do special things to make their applications run without this.
2. iMovie sucks. Plain and simple. The 08 and 09 versions are particularly bad. Even iMovie HD 06 is not that great compared to Windows Movie Maker on XP.
3. In an ideal world, Apple would have no problem letting me install OS X on a computer I built myself.
4. XCode is a terrible, terrible thing.
Here's some stuff I like about Windows:
1. DarkBasic
2. Windows 7 window management is simply awesome. Mac beats XP because of Expose, but Win7 takes the cake.
3. DirectX
4. Visual Studio. I started using 2010 at work today and it's a dream come true.
5. Gaming. Even Mac fanboys admit it's not worth trying to game on Mac.
6. PowerShell
Windows and Mac OS are excellent operating systems, people need to draw a line and get over it. I use Win7 for some tasks and OS X for others. OS X is
generally simplified for layman's use, but to lambast it and imply that it's underpowered or only for the computer illiterate is just a display of ignorance. You use your software, and I'll use mine. No need to insult me just because I belong to a particular userbase.
