The northlondonhippy

Archive for March 8th, 2007

It’s just over 2 years since I aban­doned my old beige box and upgraded my life to an iMac. I’m still very glad I did; a day doesn’t go by that I don’t con­grat­u­late myself for my bold deci­sion to switch.

I’m seri­ous. My iMac has brought me more joy and plea­sure than any other device I’ve ever owned. It is such an ele­gant machine, so sim­ple and clean in design, yet at the same time a com­plex, multi-functional com­put­ing device, capa­ble of a myr­iad of func­tions, each per­formed flawlessly.

It’s a deep and endur­ing love, as I’m sure you can tell.

Some­times, even when it’s sleep­ing, I just glance over at it, sit­ting qui­etly in the cor­ner, on my desk and I can’t believe how good it looks. I’ve got a 1.8 G5, 20” model, which is now sev­eral revi­sions out of date and I still feel this way. The newer mod­els are slim­mer, faster and more pow­er­ful, but mine still does the job rea­son­ably enough.

The only thing con­nected to my iMac is the power cable, every­thing else from net­work con­nec­tiv­ity to the key­board and mouse are all wire­lessly attached. It’s a neat and tidy lit­tle set-up.

But beyond the design is the func­tion­al­ity and at the heart and soul of that is Apple’s oper­at­ing sys­tem, Mac OS X.

I started out briefly on Pan­ther, 10.3, but not long after I switched, Apple released Tiger, 10.4, which is what I’m still on today. Leop­ard, or 10.5 will be released soon and I’ll upgrade to it fairly quickly as well.

Why do I love OS X so much? Let me count the ways!

For starters, I’ve never had a sys­tem crash. I’ll say that again, I’ve NEVER had a sys­tem crash! I’ve not had a sin­gle one in over 2 years. The only time my sys­tem gets restarted is when I’ve had to run an update to the OS that required it.

And I don’t just mean my iMac either, I also had an iBook for over a year and I’ve had my Mac Mini for around 6 months; none of them have crashed.

OS X is well designed and intu­itive and it has so many amaz­ing things built into it that you can do just about any­thing! I’ve never found a com­puter to easy to set up; you can lit­er­ally have one out of the box, con­fig­ured and online in ten min­utes or less. I had the Mini run­ning after around 5 min­utes of de-boxing. Let me see you do that with Windows!

Things just work on a Mac. For exam­ple, I’m on my third mobile phone since I switched over to Apple and each phone inter­faced with OS X effort­lessly. I can send files, includ­ing cam­er­a­phone snaps back and forth using Blue­tooth; I sync all of my con­tacts between the phone and Address Book and all of my iCal events sync as well, again over Blue­tooth, so no cables for me!

Here, let me really blow your mind:

My Mac Mini is media hub, han­dling all of my dig­i­tal video and audio. As well as play­ing back video on my 32” Sony Bravia, it plays my entire iTunes library through my stereo, I also have an Air­Port express in my kitchen, con­nected to some speak­ers, so I can groove and cook using AirTunes.

This is where it gets fancy-smancy….I use Salling Clicker installed as a java app on my Sony-Ericsson k800i mobile phone to con­trol the Mini over Blue­tooth. What this means is I can wake up the Mini, choose a song, or playlist, and basi­cally have full nav­i­ga­tional con­trol of iTunes, wire­lessly, remotely and with­out dis­turb­ing what­ever is on the tv or touch­ing the keyboard/mouse. Oh and I get full colour album art­work on the phone’s screen too.

How cool is that? Or did I lose you?

The range of Blue­tooth is good enough that I can still con­trol the Mini from the kitchen, so if a track comes on I’m not down with, skip­ping it is just a thumb-flick away!

Pretty much any­thing you plug into a Mac will work, old key­boards, mice, exter­nal hard dri­ves, print­ers, DV cam­eras with Firewire ports, you name it!

Cre­ativ­ity is where a Mac really excels. Audio and video come nat­u­rally to a Mac and right out of the box too. Garage­Band and iMovie are pow­er­ful tools to get you started but again are sim­ple to use. You also get iTunes and iPhoto for organ­is­ing your media and iDVD for burn­ing your own.

No, I don’t get a com­mis­sion; I just gen­uinely like all these toys.

I’ve talked other peo­ple into switch­ing to Apple, just as some­one con­vinced me to at least con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity. Peo­ple always thank you when you do.

My old PC, a fairly non­de­script Dell was way past it’s sell by date and it was time to con­sider replac­ing it. Right around the same time I start­ing think­ing about buy­ing a new one, Apple intro­duced it’s first flat screen iMac. I think it was around August 2004.

I remem­ber read­ing about it at the time and think­ing how cool it looked, but not believ­ing that a pow­er­ful com­puter could be housed in a form fac­tor so impres­sively thin. I didn’t really give it that much thought after that.

As I con­tin­ued my research into a new com­puter of the PC vari­ety, a col­league at work told me I should take a look at what Apple could offer. I did, I took a very good, long hard look and I liked what I saw.

I learned loads; about the oper­at­ing sys­tem, the hard­ware, Pow­erPC proces­sors, you name it. I dis­cov­ered just how good and how pow­er­ful an iMac could be. I wanted one.

It finally arrived in Feb­ru­ary of 2005 and it was every­thing I hoped it would be and more. Every­thing I tried to do with it, it did, with­out any has­sles or headaches. There were no dri­vers to install, no scary con­fig­u­ra­tion screens; it just did every­thing I wanted.

Once I tasted my first bite of Apple, I wanted more. I bought the iBook, I bought an iPod, I bought the Mini, I sold the iBook and now I’m wait­ing for the next refresh to buy another lap­top. Please let them come soon; I’ve been wait­ing for months!

Since becom­ing a Mac-head, I’ve dis­cov­ered many other peo­ple who belong to the cult of Cuper­tino and each is as evan­ge­lis­tic on the sub­ject as me. Own­ing a Mac is like belong­ing to a secret club and we’re all thrilled to be mem­bers. At least there’s no secret handshake.

Mac’s are on the cut­ting edge of design and tech­nol­ogy, they’re made from the best com­po­nents and will give you years of good ser­vice. And when things go wrong, and they might as is the case with any­thing hi-tech, Apple are sur­pris­ingly good at sort­ing it out for you and yes, I know that from experience.

Would I ever con­sider switch­ing back to Win­dows? Not in a mil­lion years! Not for all the tea in China! Not even for a go with your sister!

Once you’ve used a Mac, you would never want to go back to Win­dows. Every­thing is eas­ier and more intu­itive, why would any­one want to give that up?

I guess you can tell I’m glad I made the switch.

Does my Mac do every­thing a PC can do? Yes, of course, but that’s not the ques­tion you should be asking.

Does my Mac do every­thing bet­ter than a PC? Oh yes, and more!

If you’re think­ing of switch­ing, you owe it to your­self to make that leap. Once you do, you won’t look back!

PS

Here’s a full res­o­lu­tion photo I took on my phone the other day, the k800i. Enjoy!

Click image for full size.