Why I use and will continue to use a Mac

What I use:

13” MacBook Pro 2012

2.5 GHz Intel i5 with HD Graphics 4000 1028 MB RAM

16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 (very useful for virtual machines)

240 GB Intel 520 SSD


 

my situation:

I’m currently a student in the IT Kolleg Imst, Austria. Main use of my laptop in college is server virtualisation, programming and taking notes. I also use it for general media & web consumption and light audio editing. No gaming. No video editing.


I don’t want to change OS


My first computer was a used Powerbook G3, that my parents got me for school when I was 14 or 15. Before that I didn’t have much computer experience other than a few minutes on my Dad’s Windows 98 PC. My neighbour gave his old laptops to his kids and when they were done with them I got the scrapps. I grew up using an assortment of used Apple Laptops that were on the brink of breaking. I hate to admit it but I had my first real facetime with Windows in technical kolleg for computer and communication (in Austria its like a High School with an emphasis on a practical field) with 16. Now I have used Windows XP/7/8 and several Linux distros but I’m so used to to Mac OS that I find it heavy to change.


I’m invested in the ecosystem


My phone, my tablet and my pc are from Apple. They work together without a lot of setup. If you are used to that convenience it is not easy to use something different.


ease of use


Part of the appeal of Mac OS X is that everyone with a bit of pc experience can use it. It is basically fool proof. Especially the system preferences are so user friendly compared to Windows. Most of the things you need are easily accessible and in my opinion logically constructed. Another thing are the preinstalled programs. You don’t get a lot of bloatware. Some of the useful programs are:

  • Preview, a picture and PDF viewer (a good PDF viewer is more useful than you think)

  • iMovie, for video editing

  • iPhoto, a photo archiver

  • GarageBand, audio editing

  • iTunes, well known

  • Safari, not the best but miles better than IE

  • Time Machine, backup software

  • Pages, Numbers & Keynote, MS Office equivalents

They are all not the best in their class but they work and are relatively easy to use.


nice hardware


Apple computers are nicely built. There are not a lot of companies who put as lot thought in design and material as Apple. To some that mae not be as important but I appreciate that. The actual hardware components are not the cheapest so you can expect some level of quality. The biggest hardware advantage is the battery. Up until Haswell not a lot of manufacturers could match the battery runtime of Macs. Even with my entry level model I get about 5-6 hours of use. I have disassembled and changed parts in pretty much every laptop i had and several of other people. It is acceptably easy and there is an abundance of guides to do so. Apple SW is tailored to the HW. That makes if feel a lot snappier to an equivalent pc with Windows on it.


multi desktop feature and trackpad gestures


I have a small screen on my laptop just because it is more comfortable if you carry it around all day. With that comes a disadvantage of missing screen real estate. Mac OS X makes up for that with a multi desktop feature. You can have several apps open in full screen on different “desktops” and switch between them with a simple trackpad gesture. That eliminates a lot of window clutter.

The trackpad gestures in general are very useful and easy to learn:

  • tap/click with two fingers for secondary click (left mouse button)

  • scroll horizontal and vertical with two fingers

  • pinch to zoom with two fingers

  • rotate with two fingers

  • navigate back and forward in browsers and Finder (like Explorer) with 3 fingers

  • switch desktops with four fingers

  • pinch with four fingers to get the “app tray”

Apples Trackpads are imho equal to multi button mice in general use and productivity, although not as precise.


resale value and a big second hand market


You can get a cheap second hand Mac for a low price and if you buy a new one you know, that it will keep a value a long time.


UNIX kernel


Mac OS X runs on a UNIX kernel so the terminal/command line is nearly the same as on the Linux distros. You get a lot of the useful command line features and the great guides from the Linux community.


there are a lot of reasons against a Mac:


  • they are f-ing expensive

  • Apple is sparse with ports

  • you can’t change a lot of the parts on the newer and higher end models

  • only one year warranty

  • a lot of apps don’t have a version that runs on Mac

  • small amount of games


I’m not one of the Macintosh snobbs that thinks its the best OS, because it definitely is not. Mac OS X and Apple Hardware are not the best but they fill my computing needs. I hope you can see my reasoning in using a Mac. I’m looking to get into a well mannered discussion. No OS racism please.

meh, I know a guy like you, at my uni. he uses a powermac server... and a hackintosh.

maybe you can setup a hackintosh if you need better performance. 

until know I never needed more power, but a hackintosh is definitely on my wish list.  

i do not game at all, so I can live with a mac alone.

I want to make proper build for a long time, but I nether have the necessity for the horsepower nor do I have the money.

as a mac user you get a lot of hate and I wanted to give my viewpoint.

I am well aware that a macs aren't the be all end all.

a mac isn't for everybody, especially if you are a gamer.

 

no, I didn't think that your post was hateful.

thats the good thing in this forum. not a lot of hate.

before I bought a mac desktop I would totally opt for a hackintosh.

It's people like you who change the view of mac users, and I appreciate that. You are entirely correct about the ecosystem. Once you have two apple products, it is hard to not purchase another because of how seamlessly they communicate with each other. Apple really struck gold with this and they idea of "joy of use", and for that I just have to shrug and tip my hat to them.

I don't hate apple nor do I hate the users, and I think anyone would be in the wrong to do so. Apple has done some great things for the industry, but they have also damaged the industry greatly. We won't go there but what I dislike the most about apple is mainly locking the users in a cage. I understand it is for security reasons, and it is in that way that it is foolproof, but I wish there was a way they could open it without damaging that foolproof aspect too much. When I think of the people up at apple looking down at their users, imagine a ruler on a high throne, overlooking millions happy sheep each locked in their own small caged sandbox, but the sheep themselves are happy, perfectly fine with being in the cage. They love the sandbox they are in so much they don't even realize the steel bars around them.

I digress.

When I heard rumors about them making the current osx free, I was really hoping that they were going to make it open-source. But that did not happen, which made me very sad. I wish they would go back to their roots of BSD and the thought of open software. 

I grew up on os8-10.2, and the only reason I did not become an "apple snob" like many of my family members is because I was installing linux kernels and c-compilers on the family's old powermacs. I learned early on the beauty and freedom of open software, and just fell in love. Family members thought I was absolutely crazy, looking at this command prompt all day with a huge grin on my face.

I respect you for your viewpoint, and I hope you spread your thought process among other apple users.

I don't make a lot of contact with the steel bars but I'm well aware of them. It is crazy how they lock you down.

Yeah. In the Wozniak time they tried to innovate and differentiate themselves from other companies but now their progress is a bit stale. They trie to be better by slowing down everybody's progress threw weird patent claims. That is not healthy for the industry and thats where a lot of the apple hate comes from. It is just shit how they behave.

I will try to convince other apple users but some of them are as hard to get of their beliefs as extremist religious groups. 

I am a windows user and long time Linux enthusiast. I am by no means even willing to entertain the idea of Mac but I can see the reasons for using it. Unfortunately I am surrounded by a growing population of Mac snobs.

I have a few friends who are heavy music editors. One went so far as to buy a mac buy thousands worth of software and then buy a copy of windows to install on his Mac because "Mac hardware is bulletproof and windows is perfect..." 

I had tried for a long time to build a computer form him and it would have come out cheaper and been built specifically for the purpose of music editing. He was blinded by the "Shininess" of Mac and could not see the money thrown into the hole that is crippling addiction. The steel bars analogy is perfect for this case. He is firmly encased and cannot see the problem, to him the fields are green and life is good, all the while losing time and productivity by running windows through bootcamp. HE also games through Bootcamp on Windows on the under powered Macbook he uses and still claims it is "better" with no basis for backup. Only that the hardware is durable.

He has since convinced others to use Mac for the same purpose, even though they came to me first to build a system. Selling snake oil to all of them in the reassurance that Mac hardware in unbeatable.

His entire point is that the hardware is bulletproof and will never need upgrading. Ever.

Another case I am confronted with almost daily is another classmate who uses a Mac because it is "easier" and gets very cagey when we point out the flaws or incompatibility of apps or hardware with anything but other apple products. He is a gamer and internet consumer, it makes zero sense from him to use Mac but he does for reasons unfathomable. He has had continual problems with the printer network and refuses to acknowledge that it is Mac causing his problems, be it hardware or software related.

Like I said I can see the legitimate case you have for using it, there is no reason to switch. If you had started Linux this might be a very different post, you would never need to defend yourself, I always wonder why this is but it seems to always be the users defending the system that screams to me something is wrong. Just so often I see people who have no base in PC culture buying Mac's because they are "better", even when confronted with the base facts that they are wrong on many points. I want the world to be a connected and inter operable place, unfortunately Mac seems to be doing everything in their power to shut them selves off from the rest of the computer world.

I am a Windows user because of games alone, I already use 90% opensource programs that come from Linux in the beginning. I honestly hope that the situation will change in the next 5 years and I will be a full time Linux user. 

I am truly sorry if this sounded ranty. I never meant it to be an attack on Apple but they are not making it any easier to see a reason to like the as the days pass.

You are completely right. If I had started on a different system I would have stuck with that one. As I read my post again and the comments it seemed to me like I defended using drugs.

Like I said Apple and some of the religious users give a lot of reasons to hate. If I say I use a mac a I get assimilated with those apple snobs and often get the same treatment.

 

That is my problem. As much as I don't like Mac that is largely down to people having to defend it. It should stand on it's own merits and it probably does quite well, I just never hear that end of it. 

It is nice to hear someone who is unbiased about it. You don't have need to defend it and you don't by and large. It is also nice to be able to have a proper conversation about it with out it devolving into, System X/Y/Z is better just because I said so. They all have their points and in a just world I would not be using Windows. Just how the situation plays out.

Re-reading my original post I do apologise fir it being so angry and shooting down Mac so much. But I do stand by it.

*Smackface* Mac doesn't even support 4k video output yet.

I love my PC and I love my Macbook 2008 (the first alu one before it became a pro)

Computers are just awesome magical calculator boxes that make me happy and stuff.

There was a problem with the early default OS X Mavericks video drivers, but both the MacBook Pro Retina and the new Mac Pro support 4K video output:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht6008

 

I freaking loathe the multi-touch things on trackpads. I want to click and scroll, and that's it. I'm one of those people who tap their fingers and even my MSI laptop started freaking out until I disabled every single gesture other than scrolling.

I wouldn't mind getting a Mac if their rMBP was $1,000 USD or less for one with 8 GB or RAM. The screens are nice, the components are decent, they are well built, the OS is nice, but they are just way to damn expensive.

As much as I love ragging on Macs, having recently started university I'm really starting to see the benefits to having a Mac; They seem to have a more appropriate build quality for being constantly carried around in or outside of the case compared to my HP (the macs seem like just one solid piece). The battery life is very good generally, and furthermore some of the features that my friends have showed me seem quite tailored towards students and similar.

Not something I would use professionally after uni (we are even learning Linux in one of my courses which is fantastic, even if it is red hat which doesn't seem like the best distro) but with 5 years left in university, and a laptop already showing the signs of  age after just over a year I'll probably be picking up a macbook of some description depending on the product line at the time and whether or not I can actually afford one...

+1 on the terminal. BASH rocks and Windows doesn't have it. Yes you can use Intermix or Cygwin but it is not the same. OSX is a good mix of Unix and name brand software

I can vouch for the ruggedness. I have been slinging around my macbook for a year and it has survived some drops. A view minor scratches, but they are mostly my fault. If you want something more rugged you would have to opt for a lenovo thinkpad, but they are not nearly as compact. 

Linux and unix similarly are not virus-free. Far from it. There are tons of viruses and malware written out there on the web specifically for these systems. 

Think of it, majority of all web servers out there are apache, why take down the desktops when you can take down the web?

The reason why it is so much more secure is many reasons, but the main reason is because it will NOT allow any user to log in to a gui desktop as root, and even if you are in the sudoers file, it will prompt you for your sudo password every time a program needs a higher level of permission. SeLinux. 

You can do this in winderp easily by making an admin account and NEVER using it, then bringing other accounts down to normal user. I mean really, how often do you need admin? Now, suddenly, 95% of all attacks never even run (and yes, many statistics were run on this, this was the average). Magic. The moment microsoft realizes this and finally implements it in, say, a service pack for all operating systems, is the moment when we can finally call winderp a "secure" operating system.

I haven't run 3rd party antivirus for years, I just practice safe browsing. The reason antivirus exists is because the largest security threat is the user.

I think you replied to the wrong person?

i think people, (apple and windows fan boys) need to understand that apple products do have there place in the market. for me i couldn't be bothered deciding so i built a hackintosh. now i can run what ever i like how ever i like. but i do boot into osx most of the time

i just dont like the people that sit there and tell me that in know way mac can compare with windows, while never looking into mac. they just have that pc master race mentality.