Macs and Me, Part I
One of my current projects is a “Rescue Ranger” deal where a project has been abandoned and I’ve been brought in to save the day. Literally. If this project doesn’t get done my client, a large ad agency, will lose one of their top accounts.
A stipulation of the contract is that I do as much of the work on-site as possible…on a Mac. Now I have absolutely nothing against Macs. I’d buy one to use myself except for the fact that I rely on too many Win32 programs to get my work done, Visual Studio 2005 and VS.PHP being the most important. The Mac in question is pretty cherry. It’s a G…5? Whatever is the latest and greatest, big processors, lots of RAM, and one of those ridiculous 30″ flat panels…the best Mac money can buy. It still has OSX rather than the latest operating system that Jobs just released a few months back.
I now have about 16 hours total on a Mac and…well, I’m underwhelmed. I’ve heard and heard about how they’re so easy to use, they’re so intuitive, anyone can use them, yada yada yada yackety schmackety. I haven’t found them to be any easier to use than Windows XP.
Easier than Vista? Yes, definitely. *nix from the bash shell is easier that than steaming pile, but then that’s what happens when you design by automated tests rather than by UAT.
But I digress. I found installing programs to be a pain. I needed the MySQL GUI Tools package as well as OpenOffice. Using Windows XP I download, double-click, and go. Using this Mac I had to download, double-click, drop into the shell, tweak settings, re-install, and go. Easier? Not so much. My time is worth a nice chunk of change, and I blew half an hour of it on the Mac.
It was also s…l…o…w. There were two databases that I needed to back up from my client’s network. I hooked up my XP powered Lenovo to do the larger one and used the Mac to do the smaller one. The Mac took 20 minutes, my Lenovo took 2. Why on earth would a shiny new Mac be an order of magnitude slower than a year old PC, and a notebook at that? Everything else took longer too. Opening Dreamweaver on the Mac took twice as long as on my laptop. Opening a website in Firefox took about three times as long.
The other minor annoyance is that to use a right-click context menu I have to hold down the Ctrl key on the incredibly tiny impossible to use if you have hands larger than a midget’s keyboard.
I’m less than impressed to this point. Maybe it’s like when your friends talk about how awesome a movie is and then when you see it your reaction is, “Seriously? That wasn’t that cool.” Perhaps there’s no way a Mac can live up to the hype. My gut reaction is that for neophytes, a Mac might be better. If all you do is use Firefox to surf the web then it might be marginally easier. I dunno…I’ve been on computers since my dad brought home an Apple //e (PR#6 FTW WOOT!), so I have zero perspective on what it’s like to be totally new to computers.
