Sunday, December 11, 2011

Further to Previous

So I ragged on Greg Sandow for his Methode-is-Mac, Dawn-is-PC tweet. His reply tweet said the Methode worked fine for him, how had it failed me?

Well, Dawn is far, far superior to Methode at removing grease. I have to wonder just what Greg washes if he's not aware of this.

Spelling it out a bit more, he prefers the prettiness of the Methode bottle to the actual functionality of Dawn, which comes in a plainer container.

The Mac/Windows comparison he's making is exactly has some parallels here. I know, because I use both platforms. I'll tell you, the MacBook Pro I use for work sure is beautiful - and fragile, unlike the Lenovo I had for work up until 18 months ago. I have a couple of dents in the MBP, which has a shell like an old person's skin. I swear you could run a Lenovo over with a truck and it would still work: I once accidentally spilled water on mine, and it took the techs three minutes to remove the hard drive and pop it into a new shell. No data loss, no reconstruction necessary, no loss of work time.

UPDATE: Try that with a MacBook Pro and you'll find yourself with an expensive paperweight. I know this because I spilled coffee on my first MBP. Turns out you can do a shell swap on an MBP. Who knew?

Yeah, the MBP is beautiful, and silent (no fan! Offensive to Jobs!), and more thoughtfully designed. Is the beautiful (and fragile) design worth the hundreds more it costs over an equivalent Lenovo?

As to the software, if you've been using Macs for 20 years because you couldn't stand working on a command line (I could) or you hated the Windows 3.1 (okay, it really wasn't great), then you're not aware that GUIs won and Windows XP and 7 look and act a lot like OS X.

Putting it another way, the Mac certainly does win on prettiness and polish. On pure functionality, the two platforms are close to equivalent. If you find the Mac easier to use than a Windows machine, it's most likely because it's what you're used to.

Clarified and added to because kalimac thought I was saying "Macs suck," which I did not say and did not mean to imply. (Sandow, by the way, was a Windows user until recently, so not in the class of people who find the Mac easier to use because it's all they've used for the last 20 years.)

6 comments:

Civic Center said...

As a bi-platform person myself, totally agree with you on everything here. Having to create fancy PowerPoint presentations that work on different platforms in different versions is my perpetual nightmare, and I find myself cursing the software engineers at both Microsoft and Apple just about equally.

Lisa Hirsch said...

I remain amazed that Apple partisans continue to trot out 25-year-old usability advantages as though they are valid today. They find Macs more usable because they are used to the Mac and because they haven't seen a Windows computer in 15 years, if ever.

I am currently struggling to figure out whether to buy a new computer and if so, what to get. I am on a nearly-nine-year-old Dell that works like a champ and is insanely underpowered, between the old processor and a half-gig of RAM only.

I keep pricing iMacs and shaking my head. Yes, I can afford to buy one, but paying $500 over the price of a new Dell makes my thrifty self crazy. That's five SFS orchestra seats, several SFO seats, and a whole season of Old First seats!

Are Google Docs presentations powerful enough for your needs?

Patrick J. Vaz said...

Personally, I've tended to avoid Macs because I hate the cultists, with their air of moral superiority and generally advanced coolness based on buying from one big corporation rather than another -- Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as far as I can see.

Lisa Hirsch said...

I believe Macs have fewer security vulnerabilities than Windows machines have, but I would have to ask around to get details on why, other than that the more-used platform is definitely the target for more viruses.

Daniel Wolf said...

I'm constantly finding myself in groups of composers in which I'm the only one not toting a white Mac notebook. If that's their tool of choice and they can afford it, great, but for the amount of power and memory under the hood, I've never been able to afford a Mac myself. Instead, I've used machines I've assembled myself with both Win and Linux installed on them (my current desktop has parts going back up to 12 years in it), and have probably saved even more on the robust backwards compatibility of the machines, still running running some MSDOS and even Atari ST software while my Mac friends regularly go through periods of panic and resignation every time the OS upgrades.

Lisa Hirsch said...

They're using the little MacBooks, not the MBP? That's a surprise, actually. Yes, it is STILL possible to put together a high-power machine Win or Linux machine from inexpensive off-the-shelf parts.

I am extremely impressed that you're running both DOS and Atari software in 2011, and I mean that in a good way. :)