The maturity of the Apple platform

While I have often given Apple a hard time for some of its hardware, I probably have not given Apple enough credit for the software platform that OS X has become.

As a tool to get your job done, the Mac platform has matured.

I will not pretend that I am such a computer expert that I can prove that the Mac is a better platform than Windows or Linux, but I am not a casual user.  I depend on computers to make my living.  That has been the case for the last 26 years.

Almost every day, I use OS X, Vista, and Windows XP.  It is not unusual for me to print to six different printers in one day from three different operating systems.  I am deeply immersed in photography, scanning, writing, brochures, emails, and doing the work of a Realtor®, writer, and photographer.

If I have to, I can live off of any operating system.  Yet my operating system of choice is OS X (10.4.11).

These are the reasons.

1. I can count on my Macs to produce what I want with the least possible fuss.
2. Software on the Mac still is more consistent than it is on Windows.
3. Because of the consistency, I am more productive.
4. The creative software that I need is better and more cost effective on the Mac.
5. From startup to shut down, a Mac is faster than a Vista machine
6. Launching my typical applications takes far less time on a Mac.
7. System wide PDF printing is a huge advantage.
8. Mail on a Mac is much more reliable that Outlook on Windows
9. Somethings are just easier on a Mac. I hate the best FTP client I can find on Windows.  I love Fetch.
10. Memory management seems so much better on a Mac.

I  am not going to go into complete details on this, but today was a great example.  I have had to install a second real estate forms package on my Windows machine since the first one I used has some real quirks with Vista.

Today I was amending an offer for a piece of property. The easiest route was to fix the one page of a seven page contract and send a PDF of the page for initials of the clients and have it faxed back.

Well when I got to the point of turning the one page into a PDF, my forms package balked as the PDF converter would not initialize.  So I printed the form, went upstairs and scanned it using my Mac and VueScan hooked to my HP6180.  I scanned it as a PDF and emailed it to the clients.

Unfortunately when I went back to the office I needed another PDF of a different form so I had to switch back to the Vista unfriendly first forms package which does seem to create PDFs.  That means I had to re-key all the names and addresses.

Earlier in the week someone showed up at a meeting with a flyer for an event that we were doing.  The flyer was so poorly done that it wasn't even all on one page.  Part of the text had run off the page.

It certainly was not something that I would use. While this linked file that I had quickly created in Pages is not the high quality file (PDF download) that I sent my customers, even in its reduced size version for the web, it is far better than what I saw from the Windows world.

Today a client asked me to go measure the length of house next to a lot that he wanted to buy.  He also wanted pictures of the lot.  Within in minutes I had posted a web page created in Photoshop with a line showing how I measured the house and had an album of pictures of his lot to be.

Obviously I could have done the Photoshop stuff on Windows, but I doubt there is a package that does photo albums as easily as RapidWeaver on the Mac.

I put up three albums on Tryon Palace this weekend with almost no effort.

While I find Mail on the Mac more dependable than Outlook, I find the search in Outlook and Google's Outlook search better than the search on OS X 10.4.  Perhaps Leopard's search is better.

Lots of little things make the Mac experience better.

Above all I do not find myself waiting on a Mac like I am on my Vista laptop which often gets bogged down with lots of applications open.

When you get right down to it, I can use any platform to get my work done except for a few things.

Still the any platform I choose is a Mac.  I am now convinced that is not going to change anytime soon.

I think Apple could use some competition on the hardware to get the prices in line, but there is no doubt in my mind that if you want to get your work done and have it look the best that is possible with today's technology, you had better be using a Mac.

That decision isn't nearly as hard as figuring out where to live.

Comments

[Partners in Grime]

If quality of hardware and options included are compared, one finds the Mac competitively priced.

[Roland Dobbins]

Why don't you just use VMWare Fusion, instead of separate machines?

[ocracokewaves]

The Windows forms packages that I have to use for real estate are hard enough to read on 15" screen of a Windows laptop. I don't think they would be usable on my MacBook.

The amount of money that I would have spent to upgrade the hard drive, memory, and buy a Windows OS was very close to what I paid for my whole Windows laptop.

http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/2007/10/on-the-eve-of-a.html

[Jan]

If you like 10.4.11 you are going to love 10.5.3. Version 10.5.2 was the real release of Leaopard, but a lot of things have been corrected in 10.5.3.