Apple assessment

After using my new Powerbook for a little over a week I feel obligated to write about the pros and cons of all Apple that I have encountered. If you're thinking of buying a Mac (Jacob and Matt) than pay close attention.

Firstly, the service. Ordering was a little difficult, I will have to admit. Although this may not happen to you, my parents were purchasing with a Debit card. Now, a debit card such as ours has a $500 daily spending limit as a fraud protection utility. So, if we tried to just purchase the Powerbook straight from the net, it wouldn't work. We had to call Apple than the bank and set up a mutual agreement. The bank would let Apple and only Apple's large transaction through if they filed within the day. So, we placed our order and Apple promised that they would withdrawal the money later that day. Well, they didn't. They waited for a few days and there were problems. Anyway, that was cleared up eventually and the P-Book was ordered. Shipping made up for it. It came from China to Cumberland in literally a single day. That was free shipping. kudos to Apple for that.

Now, the goods. When I first got the package it looked like your standard brown fed-ex package but inside that was the beautiful box that the powerbook came in. Trust me, I don't call many boxes beautiful. You could tell that Apple put a lot of thought into package. Every detail was taken care of. After reading the boring stuff and plugging it in, I turned it on and, imagine that, it just worked. OS X 10.3 was pre-installed and it worked wonderfully. After creating my account I did a few updates and I was good. The first thing I noticed: OS X beats the hell out of XP. It really is a beautiful thing. It is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. If you just want to check your email and chat with friends, you will have no problems switching, it's all intuitive. Also, if you want to geek it out you have Unix. That's definitely a strong point. A lot of people think OS X is weak because it's too simple, you can't get any more powerful than that Unix terminal, trust me. Now, at first I was just doing the basics, installing and surfing the web. Installing is strange to a windows user. All of the programs come in image files, you decompress the image files and (in most cases) you get a one file application that you drag to the Application folder. That took a little bit to get used to. Also, if you don't like the program, just get rid of that one file and you're done. Amazing.

Navigating. You have the dock and that is all you need. I have two things on my desktop, my hard drive and a folder. The dock is your friend. You put any program you want there, click it and zam.... it's open. Nice. I won't get into too much, but the file organization of OS X is great, it forces you to organize yourself and you will love it in the end.

Designing. I design web sites as I'm sure most people know. So this is a big factor for me. I first got myself Photoshop and the entire Macromedia suite. They work great, lots of fonts that you don't get with the Windows versions. Anyway, designing on this thing is a dream. For instance, say I'm working with an HTML file, sometimes I want to open it with Dreamweaver or text editor, sometimes with Safari (web browser). All I do is drag the file on top of the icon of the application that I want to use in the dock and it is opened with that app. Great feature. One other thing that you will learn to love is expose. If you have a lot of windows open, this really comes in handy. Hit F9 and all of the windows scale down and appear in front of you side by side so you can pick one, hit F10 and all the windows in a certain application do the same thing, hit F11 and everything goes away and you see your desktop. This doesn't sound that great until you see it. It probably is my favorite feature of OS X. Learned to love it.

One thing that really holds people back from buying Apple is the speed. They see 1.5 GHz and think, well I can get a 3 GHz PC for that much money, why would I buy a Mac. Well, firstly, the architectures are completely, you can't even begin to compare Macs and PCs in hat sort of way. But I will tell you that speed is not a problem at all. My mom has a 3 GHz AMD PC and this Mac easily rivals that. It is blazing. Secondly, speed isn't everything. You can get a really fast car or you can get the luxury automobile. I sprung for the Benz.

In closing, if you have never used a Mac I suggest you find someone who has a nice new one and check it out or go to an Apple store. If you've previously used Macs and you hated it, try OS X. It kills every other version of Mac OS. Well, that's all I can think of now, if I find anything wrong I'll certainly writ about it. Wow that was long.