Need a sweater?

0jeff • 20th Feb 2010 • technology • apple

So Satan may be a little cold this week.  I did something I honestly never thought I would:  I got a Mac as my primary computer for work.

I’ve been using Windows for a looooong time now.  I really started back in school; maybe 1995 with my first “multi-media” PC and Windows 95.  It was an amazing leap from Windows 3.11.  I had been hooked on Windows ever since.  This is especially true given my career choice of IT Infrastructure.  My job in college was centered around IT support for quite a few SMBs in the Lubbock area.

We did everything from end-user support to server upgrades.  Novell Netware was the big thing at the time with a lot of time spent doing Netware 3.1 to 4.11 upgrades.  The whole NT 4.0 thing, we felt, was just a fad.  Once Microsoft really understood and implemented an LDAP compliant OS with Windows 2000, we were chomping at the bit to get rid of all the Netware we could.

This entire time was pretty much the dark ages for the Mac.  No one used them and no one cared.  When the iPod dropped that all changed.  I resisted.  Having graduated, I moved into a true enterprise IT shop.  After a year or so I ended up concentrating on our NAS storage infrastructure.  Frankly, the Mac was a huge pain in my ass.  LDAP? Nope.  SMB?  Nope.  Third-party painful software to do what just worked in Windows? Yep.

It’s no fault against the 3rd-party software guys.  It didn’t work great, but at least it allowed the Mac clients in the office to attach to our enterprise NAS.  These days, things are quite a bit different.

Windows 7 is pretty sweet.  I honestly love it and thing it’s the best OS that Microsoft has ever come out with overall.  The problem with the PC is not the OS these days; it’s the hardware.  Take the average business laptop from any major enterprise supplier like Dell, IBM, HP.  They’re really all pretty much identical.  There’s a severe lack of innovation and engineering.

As an example – my most recent company system from an unnamed supplier had an inherent design flaw related to cooling.  Basically, the system was guaranteed to fail.  The exhaust would clog with your everyday dust and the graphics chip was sure to fail.  This happened to me and countless others where I work.  My personal laptop had the motherboard and CPU fry.  After replacement, it was never really the same system.  I think this does a huge disservice to Microsoft.

Say what you will about their business practices, but their OS and the integration between their products is second to none.  If they had a decent hardware platform to implement what I consider to be the best OS around, there wouldn’t be any debate about what to run.  Unfortunately, this will likely never happen thanks to the various government entities.

The Mac, on the other hand, is okay as an OS.  It does most of what Windows 7 does and it does a lot of things better.  I think where Apple has a distinct advantage over Microsoft is in the hardware department.  Apple hardware is just freakin’ sweet.

Take the trackpad for instance.  I’ve had my Mac barely a week and I can’t figure out how I lived without the MacBook Pro trackpad before this.  The ability to navigate and move around the OS with the trackpad the way you can on the Mac is awesome.

Another example is the cooling on the MacBook Pro.  On 99% of the Windows laptops out there, air is taken in from the bottom of the system, moved across some sort of heat sink or heat pipe and pushed out the back.  The problem with this is that the intake on the bottom of the system basically turns your CPU fan into a vacuum cleaner for whatever dust and crap is on your work surface.  The Mac has a completely different design that eliminates this as a point of failure.

Don’t get me wrong, the Mac isn’t perfect.  The lack of a docking or port replicating option is really a pain for those of us in the enterprise.  I have to connect 4 different cables when at my desk to do what a single docking station did in the Windows world.  There’s also a lack of compatible enterprise software for things like Microsoft Project and Visio which I use nearly daily.

In my opinion, the Mac isn’t “better”, it’s just different.  There are things that I really like about it and things that drive me insane.  However, hardware reliability goes a loooong way to making me a happy user.  It’s only been a week, but so far I really like what I’ve seen.  I’ll keep you all posted…