I never thought I would be a mac user

Date: Tue Dec 24 2013 Macintosh

I used to make fun of the Mac, calling it mickeytosh, and deriding the bad design for the OS. See, I'm a hardcore Unix bigot and I truly demand stability from my computing environment, and the old-style Mac OS (OS 9 and before) just was incapable of doing it. The incapability is based in the design, as there was no barrier between applications and the lack of proper multitasking.

But here I am, now into my fourth year of using Mac. I am dearly happy with this computer and having switched.

In over 30 years of using and programming computers I have used them all. Well, okay, I never got to program a plugboard-IBM computer, but I did get to look at one of the plugboard units and think "gosh, what a strange looking device" so maybe I haven't used "all" of them all, but I have used quite a range of computers. Enough that I feel little patience with crummy systems and system designs.

Since the world seems to divide into two camps, Mac and Windows, I'll have to describe my Windows experience. I have divorced myself from Windows and Microsoft's feeble attempts at software, and I can only shake my head in disbelief over the worlds continued use of their stuff. The disbelief is over the expense involved with using Windows, and how shocked I am that people continue to put up with it.

The reason I decided to divorce Microsoft? Simple: Virus's, Spyware, Generally poor system security, Stupid hardware, Inconsistency in system configuration, Fragility, etc. In short I was spending too much time in useless maintenance tasks, and not enough time getting work done. For example the existance of the virus phenomena meant I had to choose an anti-virus vendor, and decide whether a continuing subscription was worth the bother. For example, the general idiotic nature of configuring system hardware and the inconsistency and incompatibility between different cards meant a long and tumultuous reconfiguration rigamarole every so often. And then there was that the machine would mysteriously slow down, requiring a mysterious "defrag" operation on the hard disk (a task never required under Unix).

I would never have switched to Mac if it weren't for OS X. Instead I would have put up with Linux systems, but I tried them and found them to be greatly affected by the hardware nonsense, made worse because usually you can't find drivers for a card you want to use and you end up reading HOWTO after HOWTO describing how to configure barely functioning drivers for OS/Hardware combinations other than the one you have, and trying to puzzle out how to translate to the OS/hardware combination you're actually using.

What have I had with OS X instead? Why, this has simply been wonderful. Everything just works, it's real pretty, there's an excellent selection of software, the hardware is well designed, and the whole thing is very functional.