Mac-Techs.com

I went to get a new bank account set up and began talking with the accounts person. She related how awful an experience she underwent with an HP laptop. I could relate as I have an HP about the same age. We both found our new Vista laptops to be unbelievably slow.

Slow doesn’t begin to describe the behavior of this lemon. Being a consultant I ultimately got it resolved but being a Mac consultant it took me awhile to get there.

Basically, I ordered the recovery CD from HP as I had already zapped the recovery partition in an attempt to put Linux on the box. I repartitioned the drive into three volumes and restored the Vista install onto one of them, turning off a great deal of HP installation junk as I went along.

Incredibly enough, HP’s own recovery CD was buggy and it took me several attempts to get the installation finished. Vista was still glacial, so I ended up installing Ubuntu Linux into one of the other volumes and happily used the machine for some months.

Finally, I thought there must be a solution to this madness, did some googling on ‘vista speedup’, and turned off a number of system services that finally gave me a somewhat lifelike Vista laptop. It only took two service pack installations for the HP webcam to start working.

The account rep’s experience was a little more direct. She simply stopped using the machine and got an iPhone. It serves all her needs including web browsing. She figured that since she didn’t buy a separate Internet connection for $50/month, the iPhone was affordable for her.

What I found interesting was how the iPhone for many is becoming their laptop of choice. Why carry one around when all you want to do is check your email, listen to music and perhaps surf a few pages. Doesn’t hurt to be able to watch a video or add a cool game or other application too.

I guess iPhones rock. Somehow I’m not there yet, though I’d like to have one for a week just to check it thoroughly.

Had a conversation with my banker the other day. My bank has an active online component and I frequently call my bank up to talk to a ‘banker’ or online rep about my account. In the midst of our conversation, she noted I had a business named Mac-Techs and wanted to know what I thought was preferable about Macintosh systems.
Unlike other conversations I’ve had in the past, in this case the resistance factor was nil. The points I made were that when you boot up a Mac, there are no little ads littering the desktop like on a PC. You don’t have to run antivirus, or at least myself and millions of other Mac users never bother. Plus you can run free software to virtualize the Windows environment if you absolutely need to run a Windows program, and finally the Mac comes with just about every application you need when you pick it up…throw in a download of Open Office and you’re all set.
That was a pretty powerful set of convincers, but I’m thinking she had already gotten the message. Macs are easy to use. I told her she could be productive in about 15 minutes on a Mac for the first time. I think that’s pretty accurate from my experience. Sure there’s lots of things to learn but by and large you can get things done right off the bat, no waiting.
My analogy is car buying. Would you buy a car that had the engine made by one company and the rest made by another? Doesn’t sound quite right does it. A computer system is at least as complex as a car, if not more. Doesn’t it sound like a good idea to have the operating system and the hardware be perfectly meshed for maximum compatibility? Just a thought.
Anyway, we wrapped up with me advising her to hie down to the Apple Store where she play with new machines to her heart’s content and ask all the questions she wanted to ask. I gave her a 5 out of 5 on the post-support survey too.

Do Macs cost more? There are various studies done out there that prove otherwise. The arguments are endless and prove little beyond the fact that there are a wide range of computer systems available in the retail market.
Yes, Macs do have a price point above the low-end systems of many PC makers. The question for the buyer…is it worth it when I could have a working PC for less?
I tend to look at it as a question of flow, like in getting into the flow. When you purchase a PC laptop or desktop, you are buying a hardware system made by one manufacturer and an operating system made by another company entirely. The match is not always a great one and it shows up in drivers that do not work, buggy hardware and software and a fair amount of time spent protecting your system from viruses, exploits and keeping drivers up to date.
Macs are not perfect in this regard, no computer system in all its complexity could possibly be perfect.
A Mac user does lose the potential to use some of the cutting edge systems available out there. A Mac purchase is pretty much bound by the choices made by Apple insofar as the Mac Mini, laptop and iMac lines are concerned. Owners of the Apple towers can mix and match aftermarket components at will if they are compatible and drivers are available.
On the other hand, the mix of hardware, design, Unix, interface and software make a powerful argument in favor of Apples. It’s really quite convenient to have a computer that simply works 99% of the time without having to go under the hood, install antivirus, antiexploit, latest patches, and still have a slow OS whose interface is based on OS X. We’re talking Vista here.
These are all just my opinions admittedly biased by my years of experience using Macs. I use Windows and Linux systems as platforms for serving software, not for the user experience. Macs, on the other hand, give me that experience of flow where things just seem to work, to come together, to function without needing a lot of time-consuming hacks or workarounds.