Windows Crash Course
Well, I bought a PC last night just so that I could make sure that the website we are developing will be the same in all browsers, and also to have a PC for testing purposes. I picked the cheapest little thing I could find that had a wireless card and also could run web browsers. What else do I need?
After setting it up I wanted to post about efficiency. As a developer, and a very busy member of the Practical eCommerce team, it's important to me that I am able to sit down and get the work that I needed to get done done. That's why we all use macs. That sounds like a typical statement, but I am going to skip over the fact that when you buy a new mac and turn it on, it's working and so are you within 10 minutes. Not so much on the PC I bought, which needed about 4 hours of downloads and other garbage to happen just to get it started. That's an impressive selling point.
More important to me are the little things, which I think that most people don't understand. The most common excuse that I hear from people as to why they tolerate Windows-bases machines is that they "don't want to learn a whole new system". I used to not get that, since the original transition from PC to Mac for me was more of a relief than anything else. However, after setting up Windows XP last night, I understand why people think that. It's not that you have to learn a new system, it's that you just don't have to worry about anything anymore, and I think that freaks people out. Justified, I'm sure. Without sounding like a Mac salesman, I want to put it out there that the interface alone of OS X has saved me tons of time, since I can get at everything that I need to get at within a few clicks. I can rely on the computer to do what it needs to do without shooting a million notices my way whenever I do anything. I don't have to run virus software that interferes with everything that I do. More importantly, I don't have to restart every ten minutes.
I've had my G4 laptop for years now, and it still performs better than most PC's I have worked with. While it's on it's last leg from a structure standpoint, operationally it works great, and I don't ever have to restart it unless I am turning it off or installing some new software that requires it. I've had my little PC for almost 14 hours now and I have had to restart it 6 times. You can imagine how happy I was about that.
The moral of my story is that if you don't really need a PC (meaning that you don't need some proprietary software that is only available for Windows) then I highly recommend getting a mac. I can imagine spending a total of about 3-4 hours a week dealing with just keeping the PC running properly. I don't see Vista as being any solution to this either, from what I have seen and read. If you find yourself with high blood pressure once a week when dealing with your PC, consider making the switch. Macs are more expensive, but you get more than what you pay for. You get a computer that will stand up to the test of time, and everything else you can throw at it. In addition, I challenge the average computer user to find software that they really need that is not available on the mac.
For me, it's not about anything other than efficiency. Macs let me work more efficiently. Of course, I'm not at all upset by the fact that the graphics rendering is head-and-shoulders above PCs. Take a look at the same website side-by-side sometime, and you will see that even if they started today, Windows would need about a decade to catch up at the rate that they release new products.
