It has been a week since I took the Apple plunge, and I my iMac/OS X experience has been pretty good so far (the one big fark-up was my fault). I moved the files from my PC’s old hard drive last night, so its time to “move in” to the Mac for good. My thoughts so far:
SCREEN
I have to start by talking about the iMac’s screen, it is gorgeous. I’m not sure what is different about it, but everything just looks better; more sharper, more vibrant. The 24″ of real estate is a dream to work on. Why have multiple monitors cluttering the desk when one honkin’ HUGE one will do? I have yet to use the camera and mic as of yet, but I’m looking forward to trying them out.
The DVD drive is a located a little farther back than I would like, I’ve already dropped a disc trying to find the slot, and the occasional not-quite-perfectly-flat disc can get a little noisy, but that’s true for all DVD drives, so I can’t knock it too much for that.
The built-in speakers are the worst part of the screen/CPU/whatever Apple calls it. I’m no audiophile, but they sound pretty bad to me, I quickly plugged in my basic 3-piece Altec Lansing set and Huey Lewis sounds just as good as he did on my PC.
KEYBOARD
The small keyboard freaked me out at first, especially since I like using the numeric keypad. It is just bigger than the keyboard on my HP Mini 1000 netbook, with more space inbetween the keys. The action on the keyboard is nice and typing is pretty quiet. I’ve had to re-learn typing shortcuts, due to the lack of HOME/END and PGUP/PGDN keys, but it hasn’t been too painful. That cord is just too damned short, though. I was taught that it was a bad idea to be sitting so close to a computer screen. A USB extension cord fixed that problem easily enough, and I placed a USB hub on the end of it, because you can never have too many ports.
MIGHTY MOUSE
The mouse took some getting used to, particularly due to the lack of distinct buttons. The Mighty Mouse is not Apple’s worst mouse ever (that distinction goes to the “hockey puck”) but the right-click is pretty finicky, and the “4th button” (pressed by squeezing the indentations you see on the sides) all but drove me bonkers. I don’t exactly have basketball-player sized hands, but I am accustomed to having my hand covering up the entire mouse. At random intervals this would activate the 4th button and I would be yanked out of whatever I was doing and taken into Expose, which shows you all open windows at once. Very distracting, especially when I’m trying to beat my Bejeweled Blitz high score. Disabling Expose fixed that problem, and I’m not sure how useful I’m really going to find the 4th button. Much to my surprise, I have had no problems with the teeny scroll ball. If worse comes to worse, I’ll drop $20 on a new Logitech mouse.
PERFORMANCE
I haven’t really put the iMac through its paces yet (i.e. video editing) but so far it seems to handle multitasking quite well. As I type this into Firefox, CDs are being ripped into iTunes and I am also IMing a friend. Everything runs without any hesitations or hiccups so I guess that’s pretty good.
OVERALL EXPERIENCE
I have to say, the Mac life is pretty good. I have yet to experience any of the frustrations that I have long considered to be the “facts of life” of using computers:
No more defragging, no more anti-virus, no more anti-spyware, no more hunting for old driver CDs, no more wondering why the CPU fan is still spinning even though the computer is in sleep mode, no more long boot times, no more waiting for that last program to close when I’m shutting down, no more wondering why flash drives and memory cards won’t unmount even though they aren’t being used, no more wondering if removing that startup program or changing that Registry entry is going to blow the whole thing up, and no more farking annual re-installations of Windows!
I plug in my camera, and up comes iPhoto. I plug in my printer, and a minute later, I can print. I drag an external drive to the Trash to eject it, and it unmounts. Stuff just works! Heck, even Windows Vista works well now that I have enough horsepower to make it happy.
While I’m not sure I will do everything “The Mac Way” I’m looking forward to spending less time maintaining my computer, and more time actually DOING stuff.
After all, isn’t that the whole point of having a computer?
Eduardo Soliz 