Ten Ways Switching to a Mac Will Improve Your Life

My buddy Jake sought my council the other day regarding his next computer purchase, as I am widely regarded as a handsome genius. He’s leaning towards a Mac, a lean which I fully support. Having jumped back and forth between Windows PCs and Macs several times I felt I could share with him some of the advantages of using a Mac over a Windows PC.

I choose now to share my insights with you as well, because that’s what this site is for, and also because I couldn’t think of anything else to write about.

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1. Everything is prettier

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Vista, Vista, Vista. Yes, Vista is prettier than Windows XP, in the same way that some girls are made prettier after they drop half a grand at Sephora. But just like those women, once you see them with their makeup off you recoil in shock and fear, to the point that you might confuse them with some kind of terrible zombie and try to punch them in the face. Yes, I am saying that Vista causes female face punching.

In contrast, the Mac OS X is like one of those super cute Asian girls that model at car shows on weekends to help pay for veterinary school and that don’t need to wear makeup because they’ve got porcelain skin and who you know will age really well because, well, that’s what Asian women do.

Plus, while Vista may look nice at first, it suffers from some very annoying design flaws.

2. You move closer to ultimate geek ascendancy

Mac OS X is POSIX compliant operating system built upon a BSD-derived microkernel architecture. If you know what that last sentence means then you’re going to love OS X. It has all the features of a geeky UNIX operating system, but it’s still immediately usable thanks to Apple’s easy-as-cake design aesthetic, making it an excellent stepping stone towards something truly geeky like Linux. Once you learn what “sudo” means and what root is and some nice bash commands there’s nothing about Linux you have to worry about, and OS X is a great place to learn those things.

3. You can stop pretending that building your own computer is fun

Building a computer is about as fun as having your face bashed in by a frying pan. First you have to get all the parts, which means hours of scouring the internet looking for deals on the parts you want — including making sure the parts you’re getting are all compatible with each other. Then when you get everything you need you have to set aside part of your Saturday to put the thing together. You open all your boxes, get all your tools ready, and then you start assembling all the disparate pieces. An hour or so later you’ve got all the parts fitted nicely inside your computer case, with all the wires nicely tied out of the way for easy access to each component, which you will inevitably have to have access to sometime in the future. Triumphant, you press the power button the case and … nothing happens.

Two obscenity filled hours later you’ve narrowed the problem down one of the connectors between the case and the motherboard. You know, the little one-pin connectors that all line up next to each other and have markings on them like “PWR +1″ and “PWR GND”. So you double check your motherboard manual and, low and behold, you discover that your Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer and your Malaysian case manufacturer don’t use the same labels. Apparently, your guess that “PWR +1″ on the connector connects to pin “+3V” on your motherboard wasn’t quite right. You would double check this on the internet, but since you decided to cheap out and use your old case instead of buying a new one your old computer’s guts are all over the floor.

After another hour of trying as many different pin-connector permutations as you can think of you’ve got your new computer to post, but, oh, look at that you can’t boot into Windows. The reason? You brand new ATI video card is critically incompatible with the old ATI drivers that are on the hard drive you moved over from your old computer. Granted, you deserve that for buying an ATI video card in the first place, but still!

I’ve built six computers up to this point, and each time there’s been some pain in the ass problem I’ve had to slag through. With a Mac you don’t even have the option of building your own computer, and thank goodness for that. Yeah, sometimes people need to be protected from their own stupidity …

4. It’s easier to find software

Because there’s so much less of it. HA!

Seriously, though, there’s something to be said for having a smaller selection to choose from. It’s like Chipotle vs McDonalds. McDonalds has a huge menu of really shitty food, but great fries — and I hear that Angus burger they’re testing is the bomb, yo! — while Chipotle has very small menu but of much higher quality items. So do you want to be able to pick from 25 really crappy McFoods, or from 5 kinds of tasty burritos?

Mmmmmmmm … carnitas.

5. You can justify buying an Xbox 360

Yeah, there aren’t that many games on a Mac. Just buy a friggin’ 360 and get on with your life. Gears of War is bar none the best game ever, anyway.

6. “Fringe” software is more readily available

I mean “fringe” in an ignorant “but it’s not made by Microsoft” sort of way. I don’t really know why this is, but there’s just more care in developing quality software on the Mac.

I’m talking about things like LaTeX, which everyone in the academic engineering and mathematics world uses because of how ridiculously great it is. The Mac has (appropriately) MacTeX, which is a single-install complete LaTeX system including a very high quality editor TeXShop and the XeTeX extension which allows it to use native OS X fonts. Windows has MiKTeX which sucks in comparison.

Ruby on Rails, the cutting edge web technology taking the world by storm, was built around using tools on the Mac like Textmate, a spectacular text editor. Rails development on the Mac is ridiculously easy thanks to Locomotive, a single-install self-contained Rails system. Again, there’s a similar thing out there for Windows called Instant Rails, but it looks like ass, doesn’t do project management as well, and actually spawns it’s own Apache web server to run, which is stupid to do on a development machine, which, let’s be honest, is why you’d want a single install of something like Rails.

7. You’re getting a more complete system

iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iCal, iChat, I don’t know how to use half of those but they’re free and therefore totally awesome! You buy a Mac you’re getting a boat load of practical software to start working immediately, unlike a typical PC, which is so bogged down by crapware that you have to spend hours friggin’ uninstalling all that crap before you can put some decent programs on it to then use.

8. Chicks dig the Apple Store

It is generally very difficult for a gentleman geek to take a lady friend out and find places of common interest. The Apple Store is one such place. They’re full of computers for you to play with, and they’ve got cute little nano-sized multi-colored gadgets for girls to play with.

Here’s the way it usually plays out:

PC guy: Would you like to go with me to Fry’s Electronics? Female: No way! There’s nothing for me there. PC guy: There are washing machines. Female: What the hell does that mean! PC guy: Ummmm … and, like, cooking stuff.

Conclusion: No sex.

OR

Mac stud: Hey babycakes, you wanna hang with me at an Apple Store. Babe: Sure! Mac stud: You be good, sexy, and you’ll walk out of there with one of those cute iPod Nanos. Babe: The pink one?! Mac stud: Anything for you, hotpants. Babe: Ooooooooooooo…

Conclusion: IS NICE!

9. Be a programmer on the cheap!

This goes a level beyond geek and into hacker territory. Mac OS X comes with software to help you become a tried and true programmer. You can start at the most basic level of AppleScript, a programming language for scripting and automating actions between applications. A step up and you can use scripting languages like Perl, Ruby, and Python which are included in the OS and can be used to write all kinds of simple applications. When you’re ready, you can take the leap into full desktop application programming using Xcode, the free development environment provided by Apple (as in it comes with the operating system). Yeah, FREE.

If there’s something you want the computer to do that it doesn’t already do, you can just make it do it yourself with these tools. How’s that for power?

10. Apple is to software as New York is to pizza

You ever been to a New York pizza joint? There you’ll typically find a guy named Vinnie who runs the place, his brother Anthony flipping dough in the corner, and maybe his cousin Mario who’s usually out making deliveries. His Ma’s in the back rolling meatballs. Pop might be in the corner yelling about what a dumbass Anthony is. And the pizza? It’s to die for. Why? Because these people really care about making great pizza, the same way Apple really cares about making great software.

That’s the real big change you’ll get moving from Windows to a Mac. The people at Microsoft might care about making great software too, but they sure could have fooled me. Internet Explorer? A total piece of crap that still doesn’t work right. Apple’s web brower Safari? They release nightly builds that improve upon the technology found within. Apple Mail, iLife, the Address Book, the included Utilities, the Terminal … it all has a polish to it that shows you that it was made by someone who cared about their work, rather than someone who cared about keeping their job. And let me tell you, it’s a really nice feeling to use something like that … for a change.