I went to the ACAMUG meeting in April, met some very nice people, saw a good presentation, and had a good after-meeting meal at a local Appleby's. A very nice evening! Thanks to the ACAMUG members for making me feel welcome!
On To My Mac...
First, I've been doing personal computers since 1976, so I'm no novice. I've done professional software development on all sorts of platforms since 1982, have a number of Unix machines at home and work, and also a nice collection of Win XP boxes. I was a fairly hard-core Apple detractor; they wouldn't support open hardware, cost too much and didn't have enough applications, especially the sort of engineering tools I wanted to use.
However, for several years, I'd toyed with the idea of getting a Mac. I've tried my hand at Windows programming over the years but wasn't happy with the complications. Knowing that a live Unix machine lived under the overly-slick Mac front-end was appealing. In early 2008, I went to the local Apple store and got a demo... Wow! I finally knew what I'd do with that pile of camcorder tapes we never watched, how to organize all those digital photos, how to update my web pages and finally get away from a messy set of tools on the PC, let alone the fun of Garage Band for the kids! The idea of being able to get a machine and then not having to spend $500 for applications was also extremely attractive.
At the time, Apple had this great deal: apply for a Visa card with "30 second approval", buy a machine with a printer, get $100 back from Apple, and no interest for 30 days. So I applied. A week later, they approved my application. Another week and I get a card. Another week later I get my machine, although the printer did arrive the day after I ordered it. My wife connected it to her PC and I haven't used it since! In all fairness to Apple, it's another company that does the credit card, and the country was in the huge sub-prime mess, so it's probably good that they actually checked my credit first.
My Mac friend Dave Warker said it's traditional to take unboxing pictures. Hmmm. Sounds like a cult sort of thing, but who am I to argue with traditions. So, here I am unboxing the printer in a very messy family room:
My wife said "when the Mac arrives, unbox it in the clean living room!" I did just that. The refurbished units come in plain cardboard boxes, but I didn't mind because I saved $250:
The keyboard is extremely cool, but it took taking some getting used to. Having a short travel just felt odd for a while, but now I've gotten very used to it and some of my PC keyboards seem sluggish now. I might get more Apple keyboards to replace some mushy ones on my PCs.
The Mac is sitting on a coffee table in the living room in those photos and stayed there for many weeks. It just looks so cool and uncluttered! We'd sit on the couch and watch movies from DVD or TV shows from iTunes. One night my wife and I just sat and watched a slide show of our kids and vacations. This computer isn't "just another computer" for us, it's done some things we never got the PCs to do, and in very elegant ways.
Impressions
Sorry, I don't do impressions, but I will tell you what I think of the Mac.
The first night was pure hell. I had to reload the OS twice and format the hard drive once. I think it doesn't check for bad usernames that have mixed case in them, so my initial "Bob" user was a very bad idea. It also doesn't document that if your WiFi network has a long hex number for a key, you need to precede the hex string with "$" when entering it. Fortunately I had a PC that I could use to surf the web and look for answers. Once I was over those hurdles, it came up.
The next night I finally played. We watched some iTunes TV shows that the PC could never do. We listened to CDs. We watched part of a DVD. The kids and I played with Garage Band. Dave sent us chess, so my son finally had someone better to play with than me.
My first order of business was fixing my awful web pages. If you're reading this, then you missed the awful versions. iWeb only workd with .Mac, but I have a number of my own web servers, so iWed wasn't the right tool for me. Next try was Sandvox. Better, and my 9 year old son likes it, but still not very good compared to FrontPage. I finally found RapidWeaver and am quite happy. There are lots of add-ons allowing me to do neat things very easily. Web pages are now under control! Another cool thing about the RapidWeaver (all of Mac?) community is that there are lots of neat little add-ons for $5 to $15 each, so now I've got stuff on my pages that FrontPage would never have been able to do.
Now I'm writing some ham radio applications in ObjC for a ham radio friend. It's fun to learn a whole new system. I'm finding it much faster to design programs from scratch with Xcode than I did with the Microsoft tools. I've been "seriously" programming the Mac for about a week and have probably produced almost as much code here as I ever did under Windows.
Things I Really Like
Lots of built in tools. The only software I've purchased in the first six weeks are Sandvox, RapdWeaver, and various themes and plug-ins for them. I've spent less than $200 total so far on software, but am planning on buying Microsoft Office soon.
Things just work nicely together. I can drag photos from any tool into RapidWeaver for web page design.
It's Unix underneath. I've used Unix for many years at work and on my servers at home, so if I can't remember the right "Mac way" to do something, I just open a shell and use tools I've known for over 20 years.
Including a back-up program (Time Machine) is so obvious, yet Microsoft doesn't do it, and the packages available are over-priced and not as cool as Time Machine. I don't understand M$'s view of this, but I'm glad they aren't in the bungee-jumping business: "We recommend that you use a harness to connect the bungee to, but we don't include it. Lots of third party places sell them. We just sell the cliff for you to jump from."
Having an Apple store nearby. I'm about 7 miles from the Sagemore (NJ) store. They were very low-key but enthusiastic. I'm old enough to know when I'm being "snowed" or pushed into buying more than I want, but they didn't do anything like that at all.
Before I bought, someone at the store spent an hour showing me things. I was very interested in buying a machine before going, but was completely sold by the time I left.
Software updates are painless. You get a pop-up, follow the instructions, and it's done without a hitch. I hate my PCs rebooting in the middle of the night without properly shutting down applications.
The user-centric applications are fun. It's neat to sit down in the living room with the remote, select music, adjust volume, etc while reading the latest issue of Mac Life magazine. It's meant for people, not geeks. The kids love the remote too.
Development tools are free! Apple actually wants me to write programs for their machine, unlike Windows where I have to pay to experience the pain of programming. After 20+ years of C, the switch to a GUI-based ObjectiveC hasn't been too difficult.
Dual monitor support included. I bought a $19.95 cable and plugged in a spare LCD.
Things I Don't Like Too Much
iWeb is a bit green still. It needs a lot of work to make it a decent web page editor, such as being able to support FTP to an arbitrary host.
The prices for Apple products are still kind of high. However, I've been buying re-furbed stuff from Apple and have saved a lot of money.