| Plaupius said: As much as I dislike these kinds of threads and all the hate flying back and forth, this is a legitimate question and I will try to answer it based on my own experiences. Before that, however, you might want the check out this article: Living on Air: A Windows guru spends two weeks with a Mac definitely an interesting read. clarified quite a bit of questions concerning macs. Ok, now onto my answer. I'm sorry that it is so long, but I feel that I need to get into detail to express my points. 1. Installing programs: .... but the majority of programs are actually "self-supporting" packages, meaning that the program icon you see actually contains everything the program needs. For those programs, installation is a simple copy-operation: you copy the program anywhere you want, most commonly in the Applications folder. If you want to uninstall a program, simply delete/drag it to trashcan. Both ways have pros and cons, but I can make an argument that the drag-to-Applications is easier, though an installation wizard is not much harder to be honest. fair enough. i can see the advantages to this, but how many programs are like this? How easy would it be to go into said programs' files themselves and edit them to your liking? I mean, i concede to your point because i will accept that the majority of people wont ever touch their "program files" folder in windows, but i often find myself playing with the files inside, so i'm curious. I'm assuming its more specific to the program, i.e. a game like Diablo II will still have its folder repository (otherwise i think i'd hear about more tech support to get it to work for mods) while a standard program wont. Nice feature indeed. 2. General ease of use. This is a thing that is a bit difficult to explain because it is a factor of a great number of things. The foundation is that the OS X is a coherent entity: things work the same way everywhere. Once you get the hang of it, you can use different applications easier since the UI is coherent, and that is thanks to the Cocoa API and Apple design guidelines. That's the foundation that wasn't there in Windows at least up to XP, I haven't used Vista or 7 so I don't know how they are. The bolded is i think the biggest argument when it comes to ease of use. In this case it seems like the argument is that PCs rely on individual pieces working together (both hardware and software-wise), as opposed to Macs which come with programs that work well with each other. Are Macs still as restrictive when it comes to hardware as they used to be? as in, a few years back you'd have to jump through hurdles to upgrade your Mac due to proprietary hardware, as opposed to simply buying the pieces that would work well on a PC and putting it in a Mac. On top of the foundation, there are a number of extremely useful features that I use daily in my work. Exposé, Spotlight search, TimeMachine backups and QuickLook are the most useful ones, and now that I have gotten used to them I can't really think of going back to working without them. They are really invaluable tools. I use Spaces (virtual desktops) a bit, but the OS X implementation does leave a lot to be desired so I don't include it here. i cant really comment all that much here. from what i understand, expose brings up windows of the programs you are running, and then you can click it and get to it quicker - that and you can access it by simply pressing an F# key for that matter. Sounds very useful, even if alt-tab does something similar (albeit with smaller windows) - i prefer the mac implementation though. more because its 1 key to press, not two. the others - aside from time machine, which i assume is just Mac's system restore, i dont know how they work. i'll look around in a bit. Then, in addition to the abovementioned, there are a number of smaller but still very useful features/apps that are part of the OS. One example is the virtual keyboard: want to know where you can get a certain special character from your keyboard? Just click the virtual keyboard open, and you'll see what key does what in real time as you press control, alt, shift etc. And you can of course type using the virtual keyboard and mouse/trackpad. It's not needed very often, but it can be handy on those occasions. im assuming its more that the virtual keyboard is easier to get at? since the windows one is hidden in the accessibilities options folder, so most windows users never even notice it exists.ill give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that the other smaller features and apps make it worth it and dont have their windows equivalent. One of the biggest shortcomings of XP was the atrocious networking control it had. I use my computer on several different wireless networks, some of which require different settings. OS X has built on networking location profiles that are easy as 1-2-3 to create, so I just set up the networks once and I'm done with it. With XP I had to manually change the settings for different networks whenever I changed location, again I don't know how Vista handles this. It probably is a lot better than XP. ill give you this one - i've never had to network since i dont have multiple computers, so i've never expirienced any problems with networking...since i've never had to do it. Also, the way OS X handles external displays is IMO far superior to what I've encountered in Windows, though even OS X is not a hundred percent perfect. But it does remember the external displays I have used, and the display setup I used with them so when I plug that projector in to give a presentation, I don't have to care about the settings. And when I use a projector/display for the first time, I don't go through the fn-f5 or whatever button merry-go-round that I see so often on PC laptop users do when they are connecting to a projector: I go to the System Preferences -> Displays and click "Recognize displays" and it does just that and right there I can choose the layout and resolution of my display setup. ill give you this one as well - i've never had problems with it (since i know to press fn-f8 in my case), but to anyone that is unfamiliar with windows won't be sure about what to do and what not. One example of "how things just work" is when I captured video for the first time. I connected my DV camera with a firewire cable, opened iMovie and clicked import video button and that was it. Afterwards, if you want to burn your movie to DVD or export it to Web, iMovie seamlessly connects with iDVD and iWeb. Which all connect with iPhoto and iTunes as well. My entire iPhoto library is accessible right from inside iMovie, as is my iTunes library. And the same goes for all the iSuite programs. While the programs themselves are limited, they work so well together that using them is relatively easy even for a total newbie. this goes with the above, the programs working well together as opposed to windows' individualistic nature of its programs. The last thing I'm going to mention is the hardware. You may think that it is 100% same as PCs, but it is not. While a majority of the components are exactly the same, the case is not. The displays are different at least in that Apple displays are "greener" than other laptop manufacturers' displayes. The chassis is different and the design and build quality is IMO far superior, even moreso now with the UniBody Macs. There is of course the MagSafe connector which is really handy, and there is the IR remote control that goes with FrontRow to remotely control multimedia functions (though sadly the IR remote is nowadays not included in the package, my MBP had it). The last thing I'll mention is the trackpad with multi-touch support. My own old MBP only has two-finger scrolling and nothing else, but even that is just incredibly handy. The newer models have pinch in/out for zoom, two-finger rotate, two-finger tap for right click, three-finger scroll, and some four finger gestures for Exposé. You can customize the controls, of course, but the default setup is well thought-out. ill give you this one as well - the trackpad features sound very interesting and convenient, in particular the zooming. But i would never give up my two mouse buttons for macs single button + option key, but Macs can take regular mice so thats not a large complaint - i do feel that having the option key and one mouse button is retarded though,since i dont think it takes much to have a right click. but thats personal preference. That's it for now. There are many more things I could mention, but I hope I have managed to explain a bit why I think OS X is easier to use than Windows or Linux. Yeah, I do have some very limited experiences of Linux, and those experiences have not been really supporting that idea that Linux is particularily easy to use. |
responces in red.
Probably the only thing i have to ask right now is - how convenient is bootcamp exactly? The reason i ask because while yes, you can switch to windows at any given moment to play whatever game you want, but is that its only purpose at that point? I like to do other things while i might have a game running (perhaps im busy waiting for something time-based to happen in the game, for example) and would want to do other things. which also means i'd be essentially installing the same programs twice over so that i could be able to use them while not directly playing a game and whatnot. if anything, i'd expect what happened to me when i tried dual booting linux - because i wasnt used to the OS and only had a select few things to do in said OS to begin with, i found myself not using linux at all since it allways meant having to stop whatever i was doing to switch over, and then feeling limited once i was on the other side, basically. It's probably less of a concern with windows / macs since you'd only switch over for games, which means less reason to unless you directly want to play said smaller games (bigger games are now mac compliant and what not).
aside from that, i'll give macs their due credit, even if i still don't feel that they are worth their premium, but then again, im cheap. I'd adapt to linux if i had to buy the next version of windows (as in, it didnt come pre-installed with my computer).
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