Truth be told, it could be said that I've merely come full circle back to the company that originally ignited my original interest in computers. I believe it was around mid 1986 that my dad brought home this mysterious contraption one day from a company called Apple computer. Applications and games like
Print Shop,
MacPaint,
Dark Castle and the very spooky
Uninvited were unimaginably creative for their time and I devoted hours to them. I'd lose interest in the Mac within a couple of years due to the "8 bit" Nintendo revolution. Later, I'd return back to computers beginning with the breakthrough
Commodore Amiga and eventually DOS/Windows machines.
This is also not to say that I've been completely out of touch with the Mac. My friend
Walt, a loyal, devoted Mac customer for years, and I used applications like Photoshop and PageMaker for the Mac to produce our high school newspaper. Years later, while a developer on Dreamweaver, I used the Mac daily to design, build and test new functionality.
However, a vast majority of my time was always spent on the PC where I had access to productivity tools like Office and a wide variety of games. Even today, my work provides me with a MacBook Pro and I do use it regularly. However, the Mac has really not been my primary machine at home for over two decades. Last week, however, I ordered an iMac. There's no other way to describe it other than absolute bliss.
My daughter smiling at a blue screen that appeared the day before the iMac arrived. In a bitter twist of irony, my Windows XP Dell computer decided to blue screen the day before the iMac arrived. It was as if it *knew* it was on the cusp of retirement. My daughter had a good laugh as I spent a few hours trying to fix it. No joke, but I did manage to fix the "unmountable_volume_error" which involved running a series of DOS hard drive commands created in the last century. Earlier this year, my work laptop running Windows XP hit a similar error and it wound up being fatal.
Without further ado, here are the six reasons why I decided to switch from Windows to the Mac.
- Microsoft Vista. Sadly, I have not met a single person that is happy with Vista. There was a time when I had very high hopes for Vista. As far back as 2003, Microsoft demonstrated WinFS, a technology that would fundamentally change how information was indexed and accessed. This technology never wound up shipping with Vista as was true of other major components that Microsoft had been talking about for years. Apple, if you know story, countered Microsoft by including an advanced search engine called Spotlight into the operating system.
- Microsoft XBox 360. Yes, truth be told, the XBox 360 deserves a significant amount of credit for greasing the wheels and making it easy to switch. For years, one of the primary draws to Windows had been its success in attracting the top game developers in the world to its as gaming platform. Whether it was Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, Warcraft (original series if you can remember that far back), MechWarrior 2 or The Sims, if you wanted to game, Microsoft was far and away your best bet. Though originally rather cynical of gaming on the couch instead of at a desk, Microsoft has blown me away with the XBox 360 -- it's the greatest gaming platform ever created without question. And by doing so, they've essentially eliminated my dependence on a desktop operating system for my gaming entertainment.
- Apple. In the past year, I've purchased two iPod Shuffles: one for myself and one for my wife. When I thought I had lost my Shuffle recently (for the second time), I decided to upgrade to an iPod Nano. It's an absolutely incredible piece of technology. While Apple has done a fairly good job porting iTunes to Windows, I still encounter glitches here and there when syncing files. The allure of hooking up iPod hardware to a Mac is difficult to ignore. Also, Apple's decision to extend the hardware capabilities of the iMac has really put it in direct competition with Dell's flagship desktop products like their XPS line. I was very close to buying my third Dell computer (an XPS 630) prior to my iMac awakening.
- Media Management. It's truly shocking to me that Microsoft has not improved the user experience with Windows Media Player (WMP). Something about the design of WMP has always felt exceedingly video centric as opposed to library focused. Playing an .mp3 will force most of the screen to be taken over by an annoying visualization. To Microsoft's credit, I did recently download the Zune desktop software which is absolutely beautiful. It feels like a Rich Internet Application (RIA) with its fluid transitions and vivid color scheme. Unfortunately, it's an optional download and also has stability problems. In addition, the lack of basic photo management in Windows has been the source of tremendous grief.
- Windows XP. While many claim that XP is vastly superior to Vista, I'm not sure that I agree with that. My current Dell XPS has suffered the typical Windows aging process that many of us have become accustomed to. Initially, Windows machines are blazingly fast but within a couple of months, once the registry begins to get mysteriously overloaded and random startup processes start firing at launch, the drive becomes exceedingly fragmented. Also, there feels like there is additional resource overhead in simply installing so many security patches. In my experience, typically within a year, an XP based machine will run at 20 to 30 percent of its original clean installation speed.
- Most applications are now on the Mac. Nearly all of the applications I use are now available on the Mac such as Firefox, the Creative Suite (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.), Office, Stellarium, AIM, Google Earth, etc. If the tools you use and depend on are portable, then it makes it even easier to make the switch.
Without sounding too harsh, I'm optimistic that Microsoft can still overcome some of the challenges they are facing. Windows 7 has potential, but Microsoft absolutely must stay focused on building the fastest, lightest operating system in the market. Performance is absolutely critical -- I cannot stress that enough. The latest version of Office runs amazingly slow on my new work machine, a Lenovo ThinkPad. While it's a beautiful piece of software and I like the productivity features, it's incredibly frustrating to wait three second here and five second there for common operations like moving between slides in PowerPoint or tabbing back into an application.
My experience so far with the iMac has been absolutely incredible. Front Row, the software that basically turns your Mac into a high-end media viewer/set-top box is brilliant. The standard Mail client is fairly basic, but seems to do the job. While I'm not a fan of how iPhoto stores images on the hard drive, I do like most of the other functionality. iTunes did an amazing job of importing my Windows iTunes music collection, properly transferring all meta data and file paths correctly. By modifying the keyboard shorts and tweaking a few other settings in the System Preferences, I'm getting along well and not looking back.
I take that back -- I am looking back, but only briefly as I glance to see Windows appear at a distance in my rear view window. Viva la revolución!
According to an article in the most recent issue of The Economist titled A New Twist for Offshore Wind, deep sea turbines, which tend to be significantly more productive than the land-based counterparts due to stronger winds, are suddenly becoming increasingly feasible. Several companies based out of Europe including SWAY (Norway) and Blue H Technologies (the Netherlands) are actively developing the technology necessary to bring these products to life. 
