An Ode to Mac

About 5 months ago I finally bought my first Mac. I desperately needed to replace my 3-year-old comatose Dell laptop; since I had no good reason to chose an Apple laptop over one made by HP or Sony I decided to go for the coolness factor and simply walked into an Apple store and walked out with a beautiful white 1600-dollar MacBook.

At first I questioned my decision – $1600 is a significant chunk of change. Moreover, since most of the programming I do is somewhat platform-independent I kept trying to convince myself that I wouldn’t have been happy with a cheaper HP laptop running Linux.

The more I used my MacBook the more I fell in love with it. Day after day all of my reservations evaporated and were replaced with awe and respect for Apple’s engineers. I cannot say that it is easier to program under Mac OS than it is on Fedora Linux, or that my productivity increased enough to justify the exuberant price tag. It is all the little things that make Mac OS what it is – the best damn operating system I have ever used.

One of the things that I discovered for myself is Namely. It is a little application that runs in the background. You hit CTRL + SPACEBAR and a tiny search box pops up at the top of the screen. You type in the name of the application that you want to run, hit enter and voila – the application of your choice launches without a single mouse click. When I showed this to my girlfriend her response was, “What’s the big deal?” Well, having been raised on UNIX I learned programming using simple editors such as EMACS and VI, and to this day I really hate moving my fingers from the keyboard to go to the start menu to launch an application. For years I worked around this problem by always running a command window or a terminal window in the background on Windows and Linux systems respectively. When I needed to launch another application I would simply ALT+TAB to the terminal window and type a command to launch a program.

And don’t get me started on the function keys! As a programmer I usually have a ton of windows open simultaneously – so many that they don’t all fit on the taskbar. I cannot even begin to tell you how annoying it is to ALT-TAB through all of those to find the right one. On my MacBook all I have to do is hit F9 and all the windows are displayed as large thumbnails. All I have to do is click the right one.

Dashboard is another favorite of mine. I’ve always hated having to download a ton of widgets for weather, stocks and dictionaries and have them all running in the icon tray. With Apple’s Dashboard all I have to do is hit F12 and all of my widgets slowly swim into view.

About two weeks ago I was trying to set up Apple’s mail to work with the Exchange Server at work and I noticed that when you resize the Date Received field the date format changes from long (April 5, 2006) to short (04/05/2006) to even shorted (4/5/06) depending on the column width (yeah, I know that Leander Kehney wrote about this in Wired, but so what? – I saw this first☺). It is a very subtle feature, and almost everyone I told about it replied with an indifferent “So what?” However, it’s tiny things like the changing date format, that ever-present attention to detail that made Apple what they are today – the best damn personal computer manufacturer in the world.

I love my MacBook. Every time I find a new feature I feel like I just received a birthday present. I feel amazed every time I use the “hot corners” of my Mac’s screen to stop my laptop from going to sleep that someone actually came up with something so simple and yet so elegant. Now I feel justified to look down on all the poor PC users and express my sadness by telling them, “Dude, you are getting a Dell!”