Valhalla Island

There was a brilliant question on my Macbook Returned post from a man named Harry D. So good I think that it warrants it’s own post. Here’s the question:

After using your macbook and macosx for one month and been through the way os and hardware works, taking into account your �shutdown adventure�, would you recommend macbook for win users that wish to take a look into the world of mac? (and probably never go back)

This was a question I was always planning on answering. I just wanted to get sufficient time under my belt using OS X and using the Macbook, getting a chance to perform all the usual tasks, before I made a judgement. It’s been well over a month now and I’ve had a chance to do nearly every day-to-day task and more unusual tasks I can think of. I’ve even been through it breaking down and had the experience of getting it repaired.

It’s strange to think that the thought of swtiching from Windows to OS X never really crossed my mind when I made the decision to buy a Macbook. The decision was made much more on the basis of needing a laptop and the Macbook was a very good looking laptop at a great price. Of course I’d used Macs before, while never owning one, and knew they were good computers. But price had always been the one (and only) downfall of the Mac, this changed with the Macbook. I still think every other Mac is over priced. Maybe it’s unfair to expect a much better system for the same price as a PC, but I do.

While the shutdown problem was extremely frustrating and shouldn’t have happened at all, a repair time of around 40 hours is not something I can complain about. A conversation with my friend Nathan really cleared the air:

Nathan: That’s an amazing repair time, I’m really impressed.
Me: It would have been even more amazing if it didn’t break at all.
Nathan: Nothing’s perfect, something is always going to break no matter what it is. It’s good to know that when it does, as it inevitably is going to do, you can get it fixed extremely quickly.

OS X. OS X is so great that I don’t know how I lived without it. Whenever I go back to Windows to test something in IE or whatever, doing things is really hard and laborous. It’s difficult to find where you should be, in OS X you’re where you’re looking for before you have to think about it. It’s the thousands of tiny details that make Mac OS just so much better. I could not live without expos� now. In fact that’s the whole feeling I get. Having to go back to Windows now would be upsetting.

I would much rather speak about how great the OS is over talking down Windows. The best way to sum it up is: Mac OS does the bad things you’ve come to accept in Windows the right way. That doesn’t sound entirely right but here’s an example. Lost a file in Windows? Open up the (hidden in a few menus) search box, fill out a couple of fields, click search, wait over 10 minutes for it to find a million system files. Lost a file in OS X? Hit command+space, start typing the name of the file, the file appears before you finish typing a whole word.

OS X just makes my life easier. I have pretty large file structures to oganise work files, this means that if the working directory in Illustrator is Web folder, it takes a lot of navigation to open a file in my Originals folder. Lucky there’s a search right there in the Open dialog, type a few characters and it’s there, maybe 10 seconds saved each time. When I do this hundreds of times each week, it saves a lot of time.

Something else that’s a brilliant timesaver is Quicksilver, while it’s not something already built into OS X, it’s a tribute to OS X that something like this can exist and work so well. Quicksilver allows complete and intuitive control of everything from your keyboard. It’s an inbetween between the finder and command line. I mainly use it as a launcher, say I want to open Camino, I press option+space, type c a m, press enter and Camino’s open in front of me. When you get used to it, it’s very very fast. You can also use it for things like controlling iTunes.

I haven’t spoken about the learnability of it all, how a lifetime Windows user would cope switching to OS X. I almost forgot to speak about it because I don’t see it as a hurdle, you will learn how to use a Mac quickly, no matter what, I guarantee it. Like I’ve said before, there’s a reason they use Macs in primary schools, it’s because a six year old would have no trouble at all. As for having to ‘unlearn’ Windows habits, that will happen but it’s more a case of everything Windows does badly, OS X does right. Using OS X is refreshing after a long period of Windows.

There are things such as not being able to make windows full screen that initially bothered me but I have now come to love. Going back to Windows now I dislike having windows at full screen, it feels like they’re taking over.

As for the harware. It’s just a nice piece of machinery. The profile of the Macbook is brilliantly thin and simplistic. The magnetic latch is great, the body feels solid and robust. I stand by this keyboard being the absolute best I have ever used, laptop or desktop. Built in iSight, brilliant, Front Row, brilliant. There is no way you could complain about this hardware, it’s perfect in my opinion and as for 13 inches, I wouldn’t have it any other way, any smaller would be too small, any bigger and it’d lose portability and battery life, it’s perfect, again.

So as for my recommendation. For your normal, everyday, email, web browsing, music listening user the Macbook is ideal and it will make your life as a computer user that much better. I hear a lot of everyday PC users saying ‘I hate computers’. All they’re doing is checking email, browsing the web, organising their music and photos, things like that shouldn’t be hard and they certainly shouldn’t make you hate computers. You won’t hate a Macbook or OS X.