A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective

Final Words

Writing for AnandTech is difficult. Just imagine talking to any group of almost 5 million people - are they all going to have the same interests? Should I have tailored this article totally to PC users who've never touched a Mac showing them the good and the bad through my eyes? I tried to do a bit of that. Or was I to show the Mac users a PC guy's objective take on their platform? I dabbled in some of that as well. Was I trying to get PC users to add a Mac to their "stable" of rigs? Maybe not so much "persuade", but more of "put another option out there for consideration". It has been a very difficult article to write, and I hope that all of the people to whom I'm writing at least gained something useful out of this - I know that I did.

More than anything, I'm glad to be aware and somewhat proficient in dealing with yet another hardware/OS platform, even though it's a very small percentage of the total computing population out there. It's nice to know that I'm not to totally lost if I find myself stuck with nothing else to use but a Mac. But this experiment has clearly gone far beyond just a "trying it out" stage. The G5 is a computer that I use on a daily basis and it's something that I do enjoy using. I find the multi-tasking capabilities, some of the little gems that I talked about throughout this article, and the overall stability of the platform to be great for most of the computer usage that I do on a day-to-day basis. Despite my appeasement with Apple's platform, this is far from a "switch" story.

I've outlined what I do and don't like about the platform, and honestly, if you gave me the task of doing the same thing for the x86/Windows platform, I could come up with a set of different, but similar, sounding arguments for that platform as well. In the end, they are both very strong platforms, but without the compatibility and affordability of the PC platform, I can't see myself being strictly a Mac user. The OS is excellent, far from perfect, but more so than Windows in my opinion - and all the major applications do run on the platform. But, it's not having the major ones that you miss; rather, it's the few little ones that really make it difficult. Games aside, until very recently, I couldn't use my Blackberry with my Mac, it took a 3^rd party developer to bring support for the Blackberry to OS X. Before that, I could only sync my Blackberry to my Windows PC - completely unacceptable if the G5 were my only computer. It's rare these days that new hardware, software and gadgets are released with out-of-the-box OS X support, which is unfortunately what makes completely switching to the platform difficult. Then there's the obvious issue of price - $3000 for a top of the line G5 isn't a bargain regardless of what you compare it to.

In the end, Apple has developed a very strong platform. OS X is quite possibly one of the best operating systems of its time and in many ways, is the best for what it does, and Apple's hardware leaves very little to be desired. But as always, the Apple platform is a tough sell to the mainstream for the reasons that I've already outlined. I took a chance and ended up pleasantly surprised. Maybe more PC users would be pleasantly surprised too - the problem is that even as a second machine, a Mac is an expensive proposition. Maybe instead of switch commercials, Apple should have poured that money into arranging 30-day trials of G5s for PC users. They would've probably gotten more converts that way.