After some good deeds, I’ve earned my way backwards through Hell and into Purgatory with my iMac. I’ve begun to understand the internal logic of an Apple, which varies substantially from that of a PC. In my opinion, a PC assumes that you’re incompetent and thereby builds a lot of redundancy into every act in order to prevent catastrophes. This comes at the price of both complexity and effort. For example, a PC requires you to double-click, just to make sure that you really, really meant it. Then, with many tasks, it asks you if you’re really sure, and maybe it’ll ask you a second time, just to make sure you’re really, really, sure.
Apple is more Zen-like…minimalist. No effort is wasted. Everything is pared down to a series of gestures; tap with one finger for one action, and tap with two fingers for another. Slide two fingers over the surface of the mouse and another action happens. There is only one Delete key which serves as both Delete and backspace depending on where you put the cursor.
But I’m still in Purgatory. Transitioning to a Mac from a PC as a business user is very difficult (and expensive). Many, many, business programs don’t have Apple OS equivalents, e.g. Maximizer is one of the most popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management) programs, yet they have nothing in the Apple OS. Speaking with a representative from Maximizer, I was told that the usual approach is that Mac users have to use either Boot Camp or Parallels (an additional $100) to install Windows and then run their computer as a Windows machine for those programs. Seems a little crazy after spending double the price of a state-of-the-art PC.
And here’s the kicker, the only version of Windows currently available is Windows 7, which won’t run programs from XP. So you have to buy Windows 7 Ultimate which has an XP mode! Getting my drift?
So my feedback so far? Beautiful, elegant, blisteringly-fast machines with stellar graphics and a minimalist interface. But Apple’s roots in the artistic and youth markets clearly shows….these are not machines for business types with lots of legacy issues and years of files from successive PC’s that must be migrated and made to work. Wonderful if you’re starting from scratch though.