I, too ponder the switch
Like Guy Tal, who has already switched to a Mac, and Doug Plummer, who is pondering buying a Mac, I am pondering not just switching one machine in our household to a Mac, but switching all of them. Don’t ask my how many computers that is, because I don’t know. Let’s just call it a lot, and leave it at that. And I’ve been pondering switching for a while now.
In fact, my friend Rob has loaned me a Mac G5 Dual for a while, so that I can have it around, turned on and handy, to see if I think making the switch is a win. I played with it quite a bit over the weekend, and I’m very favorably impressed. In some ways, much nicer than a Windows machine. In other ways, not as nice.
The big win, though, is that the hardware is just so darn well designed. The desktop machines are incredibly well engineered, and the newest Intel based desktop machines are just beautifully well done. And, they’re very fast, very powerful. You can buy an 8 processor, 3ghz machine with 16 gb of memory. Expensive, yes, but incredibly powerful.
And the laptops. The design for the laptops is incredible. I’m just so impressed by the laptop design. They’ve gotten so much right. Little details, like power cords that attach magnetically, so that when your beloved dog trips over the cord, he doesn’t drag your expensive laptop onto the floor.
Because I worked on computer security for so long, I’m incredibly paranoid. It’s possible, in theory, to secure a Windows pc. In practice, it’s such an incredible hassle no one ever does it. I don’t do it, and I’m paranoid. This is part of what is driving me to consider macs. Having just spent a weekend with the Mac, I’m pretty impressed at the built in security features. Not just that the features are provided but that they’re integrated into the provided software.
A few observations about the Mac world:
- You’re locked in to a single vendor. No one builds macs except Apple. You’re going to pay what they decide to charge, and you’re a captive unless you’re willing to switch back.
- The single vendor problem has its downside (price) but also an upside, which is that Apple controls exactly what the hardware platform looks like. This means that there will be hardware that might seem appealing that won’t be available for the Mac. It also means that the hardware that IS available is likely to actually work.
- Until Apple switched away from the PowerPC processor and switched to the Intel processor, they were fighting a losing battle on processor heat dissipation and power consumption, which made their desktop machines hot and somewhat noisy, and made their laptops hot and have short battery life. Since they’ve switched to the Intel platform, they’re at parity with the Windows world, and they’ve got much better industrial design. Stuffing another hard disk into a Mac Pro is simple, much simpler than most Windows machines.
- Apple cares very much about the entire, end to end user experience. That means that everything from the packing to the actual use of the product has been refined, and price is more or less a secondary consideration. In contrast, in the Windows world, virtually all the machines are made as a commodity; none of them are substantially better made than the competition, because all the competition takes place on price. So Macs and Windows laptops and desktops are actually aiming at somewhat different marketing points.
I worked writing operating systems for a long time. I’ve got no axe to grind; there are compelling reasons to stick with Windows, and compelling reasons to switch to a Mac. Which one is right for you is going to depend a great deal on you. Be very wary of people with ideological agendas trying to tell you that a Mac or a Windows machine is morally superior.
But with the advent of Parallels (which lets you run Windows under Mac OS X) and Bootcamp (which lets you boot Windows natively on your very nice Mac hardware), and with more and more people dreading the upgrade to Vista, it does seem to be a natural time to be reevaluating which way to jump instead of just following the Windows track mindlessly.
Musings on Photography 
I have found that some of the windows workstation machines aimed at the engineering and graphics markets are built much better, but at a higher price. I have had good luck with the Dell Precision Workstations for not a huge premium over the generic boxes.
Another advantage of Macs that I’ve found is their pro software…Aperture is such a great tool if you shoot in raw.
Hi Paul,
We have been using the IMac G5 for about a year now, maybe more, ( at Ryan’s urging, we finally got a Mac) and I have to say we will never go back. We love, love, love it! Interesting to read your thoughts!
Lisa
Aperture is, to me, like LightRoom done right. But Lightroom came after, so it’s like Adobe tried to do the same but did not quite succeed.
The preceding paragraph is an opinion, not a fact 😉
Caveat: you need adequate hardware to get good adjustments speed with Aperture. All the Pro Macs provide it.
I am on Mac for four years now. I have so much less computer trouble since, it is amazing. A friend bought a new Nokia phone 3 weeks ago. It took a complete Windows re-install to get back to a working situation after he installed the accompanying software. Now he just bought a 5D and installed the Canon software and now Outlook does not start anymore. He is about to switch too.
You ensue price is high for macs several times in your post but the reality is they are no more expensive than a comparably configured WinPC.
Of course it all comes down to complimentary goods. Are the hardware devices, software applications, and so on that you want available?
If you are doing CAD, Windows wins. I suppose this is true of other relatively esoteric things as well.
If you are a photographer, or just an office user, the Mac probably supports everything you care about. (Do you really care if there are robot controller drivers for the Mac?)
The coming of 1394 and USB mean almost all devices will physicall attach – whether there are drivers and they are any good is another issue (for both platforms…)
You mentioned the end-to-end experience. I bought a G3 iBook back in 2001 or so (they’d just stopped making them look like toilet seat covers).
Almost a year later, the hard drive died. It was still under warranty, so I spent 20 minutes or so on the phone with a nice person who walked me through about 3 different ways to verify that I had a problem. He didn’t blink when I said I’d dumped Mac OS X and put Linux on it. That was about 5:30 on a Thursday.
When I got to work Friday morning, a box with all the appropriate packing (pre-cut foam, just the right size) was waiting for me to send my iBook in. All I had to do was pop the laptop inside, use the supplied tape to tape the box closed, peel the backing from the supplied shipping label and affix it to the top of the box. UPS came by the office and picked it up later that day.
On Monday, my laptop came back with a brand new (and slightly larger) hard drive.
No charge. All part of the basic (not upgraded) warranty.
I don’t know if they’re still doing that kind of thing, but it impressed the hell out of me.
I’ve known several people who worked at either Dell or Apple doing tech support. The Dell guys refer to it as “doing time” and get out of there as fast as they can. The Apple folks stay for years, including one incredibly talented sysadmin who switched to doing phone tech support at Apple since he wanted something less stressful than keeping Linux and Solaris boxes running.
Of course, I loathe their 1 button mice, but that’s another topic.
Well — switching means money and if one has it to spare, fine. As long as the PC doesn’t start to smoke I’ll keep using it. My software of choice is all PC. So I’d have to emulate a windows environment to run it. Might as well just keep on with Windows. No reason to move to Vista from XP Pro. I’d not like a one-button mouse, either.
Interesting to hear Erik’s positive experience with Apple’s customer service. I’d heard from another friend that he’d decided not to switch to Mac, even though it might have been a better system for him, because he’d heard that Apple’s tech support was abysmal. They focus all their attention on the front end of the user experience, he said, make a great product, great design, etc., but then they sit on their laurels and assume people won’t need help with it because it’s so easy and intuitive. But apparently that isn’t the case.
In any event, I’m a little bit surprised to hear you, Paul, considering switching, knowing both of our background. But even I have found myself letting go of my strident pro-Microsoft stance and counseling other friends to consider the balanced assessments that are available out there, such as the recent series of posts on Doug Plummer’s dispatches blog.
I just bought a really nice high-end Dell PC within the past year, and have no plans to upgrade to Vista in the near future, so I can probably avoid thinking about this potential switch for a long time, a couple of years at least (unless my PC starts seriously acting up; it’s already started having a few odd symptoms but nothing so troubling as to make me regret my choice yet; I just have to hit F1 on boot every time to get past the apparently bogus fan error warning). I won’t rule out taking a serious look at the Mac when the time comes for a new machine, but it would still probably take a major decimation in my network of Windows guru friends before I’d join the bandwagon and switch platforms.
The mouse that Apple ships these days also works as a two button mouse out of the box. It is just that the default behavior is one-button behavior – for backward compatibility, I suppose. You just have to change the preference for the mouse in the System Preferences (i.e., control panel), and you have a two button mouse. It also does horizontal and vertical scrolling with a small spherical control in the middle.
Mac h/w and s/w is all set up to handle a two button mouse out of the box. You can take your favorite two (or three) button USB mouse to an Apple store and verify it.
I’ve looked at this decision several times when it came time to buy a new computer. Right now I’m really happy with a PC and XP media center OS but unless the problems with Vista settle down, it may be what pushes me over the edge in another year or so when I have to make buying decisions again.
Just a note on pricing; at the high end, Apple machines are significantly less expensive than the equivalent Dell.
A dual-quad-core 3.0GHz Mac with 4GB of memory and 500G of disk prices out at $4825 at the Apple online store.
A dual-quad-core 2.66GHz Dell Precision 690 with 4GB of memory and 500G of disk prices out at $6088 (on their small business store, as of today; Dell’s pricing is notoriously variable depending on when and what you ask).
With the Intel switch, the myth of Apple equipment commanding a premium price is no longer necessarily true; sometimes Macs are more expensive, sometimes they’re not.
It is important to make sure that you’re comparing Apples-to-apples, so to speak.
Re Erik’s experience with a niffty shipping arranagement to return his Apple hardly seems to compensate for the fact that the hard drive failed after one year. I’m no expert in either PC’s or Mac’s but I’m seeing some examples of where the Mac is not universally superior: For example, Mac’s have limited capability for hard drive defragmentation compared with Windows OS’s; it my understanding that Mac’s lack the positive drop identification window available when dragging and dropping in Vista; a friend’s two-year old G5 had a RAM failure–compare that with my 10-year old PC still running;I’m not sure but I believe its the case that once files have been written to a CD, no more files can be added, no matter how much free space is available,unlike with Windows. I don’t know what Vista problems Billie is referring to but I have had zero problems with Vista.
A few comments are in order, here.
First, my family goes through laptops the way some families go through paper towels. We’ve had laptops from HP, from Sony, and from IBM/Lenovo.
ALL of the brands we’ve owned have had components fail. Hard disks and display backlights seem to be the big failure items, but we’ve had keyboards fail, trackpads fail, and so on.
In the case of the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads, we’ve found that sometimes repair is possible at home; they ship you the keyboard, you install it. In ALL other cases, regardless of brand, we’ve been sent the packing materials overnight, popped the laptop into the package and handed the whole schmear off to Fedex, and gotten back the laptop in far less than a week. All at no charge, including overnight both ways.
Second, it’s very unwise to make inferences about reliability from small samples, and worthless to attempt to make such inferences without adjusting for cohort size. If you don’t know what cohort size is and how to adjust for it, then I’m sorry but you’re not qualified to participate in discussion about failure statistics that attempts to compare failure rates.
In this sense, claiming that you once knew someone who once owned a (pick one: Mac, Thinkpad, Compaq, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Gateway, etc.) and the hard disk failed actually conveys so little information about reliability that we might just as well say that it conveys no info at all.
I’m with Paul on the failure rates – not only can you not know the truth based on small sample size, all the major brands have gotten burned by bad batches of components. Batteries that catch fire, hard drives that die early and RAM that dies quickly are the ones that come to mind right off the top of my head.
Even when you get to the large sample size case, the difference between a great impression of a brand is often-times a matter of the specific model chosen. Lots of folks love brand XXXXX (yes, I’m having second thoughts about naming names…). They made great servers. My current employer won’t touch them with a ten foot pole after buying several hundred blade servers that turned out to be lemons (I think they quoted a 30% failure rate per year).
I’m glad to hear that other laptop manufacturers do a good job on repairs. It doesn’t jive with what I’ve heard anecdotally about Sony or Dell (either getting the run-around or spending lots of time on the phone), but then again, I don’t have a good sample size there, and all sorts of things can affect it. For instance, I understand that buying on a small business account can make a big difference.
I’ve heard very little about Apple software tech support. I’d be very interested to hear more. Aperture is a tempting competitor to Lightroom, especially since Adobe is trying to make me reboot my laptop because I patched Acrobat reader earlier today. I understand that Windows has a broken library model, but I still tend to blame the various software vendors when things like that come up.
I won’t make any statement on failure rate, only my personal experience with Apple customer support. First of all, both I and my girl friend own a Apple lap top.
My own lap top came with a bad battery. I called customer support, and the next day came a new battery. I switched it with my old one, taped the box, attached the shipping label and gave it to the UPS guy.
Then apple had their battery replacement program (you remember the exploding batteries). We did the same procedures again for both lap tops. No fuzz.
I bought an Airport Express in San Francisco, and when I came back to Oslo, it made a funny noise and stopped working. I called Norwegian Apple support and the next day I had a new unit. Same procedure with UPS.
My girl friend spilled tea over her iBook keyboard. I called support again, and they send us a new keyboard which we replaced ourself in less than 10 minutes. Had to pay for it, but it was remarkably inexpensive. I think we payed around $80-90 including shipping, and that’s really not that bad for a spare part lap-top keyboard.
So all in all, my experience with Apple support has been above average.
By above average I meant compared to many other companies support.
I too pondered the switch a few years back, Bought one of the most powerful g4s they offered at the time and have regretted it ever since. OS10 needs to be upgraded every few months- and Apple charges you to do it. The reason it needs upgrading is that it just doesn’t work with new application software coming out. Apple develops a fix and then charges for the upgrade. It has been an economic mistake for me and the computer does very little that can’t be done on a PC bought at 1/3 the price. Apple is all marketing and little content.