Why I love my Apple PowerBook...

I'd never actually used a Mac until a few months ago, when our office decided to set up a new design department. I wanted a notebook anyway, so I initially decided on a iBook. Even at its cheapest though, it was still going to cost the best part of a grand, so I figured if I was going to spend a lot of money on something nice I should probably waste an obscene amount for something really cool...

And that's exactly what I got! Whenever you demonstrate Expose, Fast User switching or even just minimizing a window, the reaction is always the same -- they're impressed. People say the 12" is too small, but I think it's so usable. The smaller size actually works to its advantage, because you bring it in closer. The native resolution is 1024*768, but it can drive an external monitor higher; in fact, plug in a USB mouse and keyboard and you've got a fully working Apple desktop. More than anything else, what people love about their Macs is the attention to detail. Every single component gives the appearance of being tailor-made for the role, as opposed to some generic grey box. Even the mains adapter is a thing of beauty. When it goes into standby, the display latch glows softly to remind you that's on. These tiny little touches make the difference between using a computer and enjoying it.

The real killer feature for me is the UNIX core. No matter how carried away I get with the aqua interface, when I need to do something serious I always have the terminal to hand. All the standard tools are there: perl, python, gcc, grep, vi, cron, you name it; if it's standard UNIX it's on there. To give you a practical example, I wanted to test an anti-spam STMP relay for the office. I could download and install from source, and set it up using the same software I eventually put on a linux box.

What doesn't work well

With all this eulogising, I should in fairness point out a few of its failings. For one thing, it's a RAM-hungry beast; 256MB is all it takes to make my Win2K box work smoothly, but on a Mac that's just not enough. If you're doing anything more substantial than email-blinking you'll either upgrade pronto or get used to that spinning disk. Responsiveness is a problem, too -- there seems to be something wrong with either the Darwin scheduler or the Window Server. Sometimes it locks up for 30 seconds or so when you know it's not running out of resources. It's not as stable as its rivals either. It makes me laugh when Mac enthusiasts talk about Windows always crashing, as I've had more system meltdowns already than in a couple of years of active Win 2K use. Even though it's usually Aqua that's responsible, I'd hesitate to put OS X on a server. (First impressions of Panther are that it's a little more robust than 10.2)

None of this takes away from the Mac's real strength. It's often said that whereas Microsoft tend to focus on ading more features, Apple aim for elegance and simplicity. There are times when I want to understand what's going on, and spend some time reading up and experimenting to get things going. When I'm in that frame of mind, I use linux. However, like everyone else, sometimes I don't want to be challenged. Sometimes I just want to send some mail, surf the web, and just generally want everything to work. When I'm in that kind of mood, I reach for my Mac.