Don Davidson Computer |
The Good
It should come as no surprise that the user interface is intuitive and easy to use, as well as aesthetically pleasing. It also should come as no surprise that the system is very stable. And although it's hard to prove a negative, we've seen no evidence to dispel the idea that Macs are secure and safe from malware.
Additionally, the operating system comes with a suite of
tools with a few simple features, but these features were always of high quality
and not simply added in. The iLife suite is indeed a very compelling set of
programs, and while there are equivalents available on other operating systems,
iLife remains a gold standard. Indeed, the iLife suite is also useful for
professionals in supplementing their more professional programs. A Flash guru
may use Garage Band, for example, to come up with good background music. A
professional musician using something like
The Bad
While not a particular resource hog in the classical sense, the OS does get very finicky when it doesn't get enough RAM to run. Swap load times can make a computer feel unbearably slow even when it may be absolutely fine the rest of the time.
The operating system is also very particular about the type of hardware it likes to connect with. There were a couple of peripherals that I simply could not get to work no matter what I tried.
Although Apple chooses to include support for X11 and Windows apps, the actual applications can be difficult and confusing to install, and they don't work well with the native Mac programs. In general, our efforts to get our X11 programs working more often ended in failure than success.
I'm not sure what caused it, but somehow my USB external hard drive ceased to work at one point and was rendered useless on all OS platforms. After running a few apps and commands, perhaps due to some degree of simultaneousness, something caused it to start working again. This was unsettling and unpleasant, but there was no data loss.
The Ugly
The hardware lock-in and lack of quality freeware makes owning and maintaining a Macintosh an expensive endeavor.
One won't get far using a Macintosh from day–to-day without a word processor, for example, and the effective choices are limited to the iWork and Microsoft Office suites. Only the latter has features that professionals find themselves using with regularity (like edit tracking). While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available, as is OpenOffice through X11, the none had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting anything in X11 to work at all. A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing. From time to time, there are small, niche apps that cost you - like the DVD shrinking software or the WMV converter - which have a freeware equivalent on both Windows XP and Linux. There are numerous other examples of this.
Additionally, the hardware lock-in - a lock-in that is Apple's choice - makes it hard to get exactly what you need. The Mac Mini I purchased originally would have been fine to complete this test if it had come with more RAM, but replacing the RAM was so daunting a task due to the ultra-compact form factor, I didn't bother. The only non-compact form factor that Apple offers is the very expensive Mac Pro line. Not everyone needs BlueTooth and WiFi - and I would have rather had a computer I could use. Dual-booting on a Mac brings the Mac platform an ability to play the games that were once the sole province of Windows. This should have been a net bonus for Mac but the limited and underpowered graphics solutions coupled with the inability to upgrade them negate that advantage.
And here’s the really crazy part of the hardware issue: Apple designed the hardware and the software, and still, somehow, the Mac Mini was a mess. If the company has sole province over how the OS should run on a limited set of hardware, you’d think that it would know when 512MB of RAM isn’t enough. We can understand how Microsoft can claim ignorance when different OEMs may mismatch Vista to low-end hardware, because Microsoft has absolutely no say in it. They simply point the finger at the integrators. In this case, there’s only one corporation with blood on its hands. While this article was very much about the OS and not the hardware, the supposed synergy of the two is purported to be Apple’s strength in contrast to the chaotic, hodge-podge blending of hardware and software in the PC world. While the MacBook performed as it should, we marvel at the fact that given Apple’s stifling business model for its software and hardware, it would conscionably sell a computer that it knew would not perform up to par and would be virtually unusable under any kind of duress.
Furthermore, though people complain about DRM in Vista, the DRM of an Apple computer puts it to shame. There is no technical reason why Mac OS X can't run on other hardware, and even where technical compatibility is a problem, no one is asking that Apple have any sort of support for third-party hardware. Third-party drivers can take care of that, but we want to be able to have a user-friendly, stable OS to use on any hardware that we want without Apple actively preventing it.
We also ran into problems in trying to get work done. I really should have, as a reporter, been able to show you the difference in quality between VLC and Apple's DVD Player. I couldn't because the OS would not let me take a screenshot while a DVD was playing. And, as mentioned, we couldn't get a hold of a decent word processor and had to do the bulk of our note-taking in a WordPad-like application.
For most people, the only way to upgrade the hardware in a Mac is to buy a new Mac. This may not be a daunting task for those who don't know "RAM" from a "hard drive," but for those of us accustomed to reusing at least some components from old computers in our new ones to keep costs down, that can be a deal killer.
If you don't count that whole "temporarily and inexplicably ate my USB external hard drive" thing, which, after all, could have conceivably been caused by user error, the operating system is simple, stable, secure, well designed, and well built.
It is also expensive. The OS is sadly chained to the anchor that is Apple hardware, and I am less enthusiastic about that. It means that to use Mac OS X, you need to spend at least $600 on a new computer, and more for a computer that actually runs well. It also means that unless you go for the absolutely top-of-the-line Mac Pro line, you will need to replace your entire system when it starts to become outdated, rather than gradually solving bottlenecks by upgrading components.
Apple has historically been criticized for its use of proprietary, non-upgradeable components in its systems, but in the early-to-mid-2000s, Macs started to once again "play well with others" and made computers whose lives could be extended through consumer or third-party upgrades. A move to the Intel architecture may have caused some to anticipate that Apple would move further in this direction, but it seems to have moved further away from it.
Furthermore, the lack of freeware requires either resorting to illegal activity or resorting to paying out the nose for commercial software. Don't get me wrong, commercial software is often well written and worth the money, but most people don't need the professional version of the application in question. Generally, a freeware solution usually works quite well for the end user's needs. Unfortunately, the “good” freeware seems to only be available/fully functional on Windows and Linux.
Finally, for anyone switching over from a Windows XP setup, the spotty peripheral support means that it's likely that you'll have to replace one or more peripherals to find ones that are Mac compatible.
In my earlier evaluation of Ubuntu Linux, I wrote: "Linux has some glaring flaws, but it also has some amazing capabilities that can't be found anywhere else - at least without spending a lot of money."
It would be accurate here to say: "Mac OS X has some amazing capabilities, but you spend a lot of money." Indeed, it seems the preferred method for solving Mac computer problems is to buy your way out of it. Slow computer? Buy a new one. Want to convert a file? Buy a utility. Want to do simple tasks? Buy a commercial program. Peripherals don't work? Buy replacements.
Mac OS X provides a pleasant end-user experience when operating from day to day, and it is, by leaps and bounds, the best multimedia platform by default. It's really a nice ownership experience for those who are willing to spend the money. It's got stability, ease-of-use, and no spyware. This is why, when ComputerWorld's Scot Finnie did a similar experiment (over 90 days), he decided to stick with the OS.
But Scot and I are very different computer users (and perhaps members of very different tax brackets). For myself, I can't justify the cost of buying an expensive new system that does less than my ugly, hodge-podge, dual-boot Windows/Linux system, no matter how pleasantly it does the tasks it can. Sure, the iLife suite is an impressive software package, thrown in “free,” but if you already have a powerful computer, even buying Windows commercial software (Sony Music Studio, Adobe Premiere Elements, Picasa, etc.) to get the same functionality as iLife will cost you less money than buying a brand new Mac system.
Mac OS X is merely good, and that's not enough for me to get over the inadvertent hurdles of the OS, not to mention the deliberate ones Apple puts in my way. While my experiences have been good throughout the 30 day period, I have pined for the flexibility of my Linux partition and the games of my Windows environment. I returned the MacBook to Fry's for the refund and went back to using my Linux/XP setup on Whakataruna.
In the end, though many power users may look at the Macintosh OS as a key solution for stability and security - and it is - I do not think that Apple caters to this particular segment of the market in its current hardware choices. The OS may be right for those who can afford it, want to avoid complexity on the computer, quite literally, “at all costs,” and are happy with the limited selection Apple offers. However, it's just not right for me - and I imagine, for many users like me.
The rest of the article starts here.
|
or Just |