Remembering Why I Like Apple

After so many years of using a Mac at home, I started to have thoughts, like, “well maybe Windows isn’t that bad. People seem to get along OK with it. My work computer has problems, but that’s probably because I do weird things with it.”

But then reality hits and I realize how dreadful it is to use a PC.

Things that annoy me about Windows:

  • Since Windows has such a good reputation for security, it is mandated that I have Symantec Antivirus installed at work.  This wonderful program causes explorer.exe to hang when I browse files.  Then I get to CTRL+ALT+DEL and restart explorer.exe.  Woohoo!
  • The MDI paradigm is so clunky!  I have two monitors, but apps like Visual Studio can only occupy a single monitor.  I’d very much like to drag my output/find/project navigation windows to the other screen, but that’s just not practical in Windows.  MS has tried to make some apps like Word more SDI-like by putting each Word or Excel doc in its own task bar item.  However, Excel has the wonderful habit of closing all spreadsheets when I close a single Excel window.  Word doesn’t behave like that.  Excel, why can’t you be more like your brother?!
  •  Those handy reminders the pop up in the task bar, like “Outlook is taking too long to respond.”  I’m glad that Windows is barging in and spending more CPU cycles to tell me that something is taking a long time to process.
  • IE7 is still the worst browser ever made.  How many times have I told it to save my username/password for that site that needs HTTP authentication?  Does it listen? No!  And let’s not forget IE’s outright flaunting of web standards.

How is Mac OS better?

  • No viruses so far.  However, I have run Windows without AV software for a couple of years without any problems - you just have to stay up to date on patches, stay behind a firewall, and don’t open suspicious attachments.
  • I love SDI.  Not ever Mac app is SDI (like Eclipse) but I love having separate windows that I can put anywhere.  I like having a consistent spot to look for the “File” menu.
  • No annoying popups.
  • OK, browsers aren’t OS-specific, but at least the browser isn’t built into OS X.  I still can’t understand why Microsoft has left IE so tightly coupled with the OS.
Published in: on October 10, 2007 at 09:03

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3 Comments Leave a comment.

  1. On October 15, 2007 at 04:29 Chad Said:

    Amen, brother! My MBP has made me fall in love with Apple all over again. My old G3PB was virtually useless to me the last year or so I had it, but nowadays I hardly even touch the PC.

    I can’t wait to buy Leopard this month and put Apple’s latest OS features to work.

    No offense, and I know its ironic to be saying it when one is “anti PC” and/or “pro Apple”, but you have no idea how much you love Apple until you boot your Apple natively into Windows. While I rarely use Windows on my Mac, its still cool as hell to boot into it, and its just nice to know its there if I do need it.

  2. On October 25, 2007 at 08:57 Keith Elder Said:

    You are wrong about Visual Studio not being able to be viewed on multiple monitors. I do it all day everyday as do a lot of other engineers. You can “undock” any tab or window within Visual Studio and move it out. Simply right click a window, click “Floating” and drag it wherever you want.

  3. On October 29, 2007 at 05:44 dkastner Said:

    Keith, you’re right that you can detach the tool windows (like the Properties window, project explorer, etc.) but you can’t take each code file and put it in its own window. If I want to reference too files at once, I have to use the clunky split-screen view. I prefer the Photoshop style of editing where each document has its own window. On a Mac those windows can be placed anywhere. On a PC, you’re limited to moving them within the MDI parent window. You can sort of “hack” it by manually resizing the MDI parent to span all monitors, but then you’re blocking any windows behind it.

    Microsoft has hacked around this with Word and Excel, but then you have the confusion in the task bar, where a single task bar item can represent multiple documents, yet each document has its own window. It gets confusing when I close the Excel main window and end up closing all my Excel documents.

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