At the end of April, I posted about my first month with my new mackbook.  I figured I would take a little time to put together a follow-up on what I like and what I dislike and add some new thoughts and a final wrap-up.

What I Like

I still like the hardware of the Macbook, the simplicity of bootcamp, the fonts, and the keyboard. The construction of the Macbook is stellar. Like I said before, this notebook was $1200 and it feels like it is worth every penny. I still dig the multi-touch pad…well, most of the time. I have an ongoing problem of accidentally zooming in when using Safari. I think 60% of this problem can be contributed to user error, and about 40% to the system. The fonts are great. And, the OS is still smooth. In the previous post, I said that I liked Safari 4. Well, that love affair quickly ended. While for the most part it does the job, I did notice that I got that little spinning rainbow icon when loading complex pages. This is the Mac’s version of locking up. So, I have switched primarily to Firefox. And, I am really looking forward to the beach ball (Google Chrome) coming to the Macbook.

What I dislike

I really still do not like the OSX dock. Yes it is pretty, but it has a lot of usability issues. Minimizing windows has a completely different action than switching windows (changing focus). And, I find it extremely difficult to manage multiple windows of the same app. I am told expose is good for this, but honestly, you should be able to do this with both the dock and expose. I hear that Apple may have taken a page out of the Windows 7 book by given the dock a Windows peek like feature, so I definitely look forward to this.

And, some new thoughts

I am currently building a PHP app. And, have been using Aptana and subversion to sync my work across my Windows machine and my Macbook. So far, development for PHP on the Mac has been a breeze. There was definitely a lot more setting up I had to do to get OSX’s Apache server properly configured. But once that was out of the way, programming on the Macbook has been a pleasurable experience. I think the biggest difference for me (versus Windows) was the fonts on the Macbook. They are just so smooth, and are definitely nice to look at when pounding at the keys for two hours.

A final wrap-up

There are a lot of things people tell you about the Mac experience: the OS is beautiful, it is just easier to use, it doesn’t crash, you don’t have to worry about viruses, etc, etc. In the end, I would probably only agree with the first one. I think that OSX is definitely better looking than Vista and XP (maybe not so much when compared to Windows 7). But, I do not think it is easier to use. For me, the taskbar and most of the windows management is counter-intuitive. And, as far as viruses and crashing…I have not experienced either on my Macbook nor my Vista machine. So, that is a wash. I guess that brings me to the final question…would I recommend getting a Macbook? This is a pretty difficult question. The premium hardware definitely sets it apart from its competitors. But, overall, I really prefer Windows 7 (even in its beta form) to OSX. I think for people that are die-hard OSX fans, it is a no-brainer. But, if you are on the ledge, I probably would recommend waiting around until Windows 7 comes out and make a decision then.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 6:49 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.