I have long been thinking of getting a Mac, but since I am not a developer or designer, there wasn’t really a compelling reason to do so. But when the AppStorm network called for writers a few weeks ago, I jumped ship and bought a MacBook Pro. And boy – am I loving it or what!
Apart from obvious things like being the coolest looking operating system on the fastest hardware available (and being totally immune to viruses and spyware), there are a lot of reasons why I consider this to be my best purchase of the decade. You can find five of the top reasons that made me a Mac fanboy after the jump.
Breezy Installation & Uninstallation
Installing an App
Apps downloaded from the Internet or from a CD/DVD can be installed in far fewer steps compared to a PC app. Actually, in most cases, installation will be complete in just a couple of steps.
The first step is double clicking on the .dmg image, and then dragging the app into the applications folder. That’s all the work you have to do. Some apps do need your attention but still the of number of steps is far less than in Windows.
Uninstallation
Think that was sweet? Try uninstalling an app. All you have to do is go to the Applications folder, right click on the app and click “Move to Trash”. No need to don the reverse engineer hat like in a Windows PC where you will have to hunt down the dependencies installed. And you’ll never need to concern yourself with the registry ever again!
Preview Files With Quick Look
Not a fan of launching apps to view files every now and then? You will love Quick Look. With the help of Quick Look, you don’t need to open an app to see what the file is about.
Selecting the file and tapping the spacebar will show a sneak preview of the file for you to check if this is the one you were looking for. Huge time saver in my experience.
Awesome Bundled Software
Depending on your luck – and from where you purchased your PC – you will have a scary level of bloatware and rubbish on your computer right from the word go. The more bundled apps you have, the more useless they tend to be in the first place.
A Mac, on the other hand, comes with a set of world class software built by Apple. You have apps to edit music (Garageband), movies (iMovie), DVD authoring (iDVD), photo editing (iPhoto) and much more. You can start working on a Mac as soon as you unwrap it.
The Menu Isn’t Attached to App Window
Controls
As you can see from the screenshot, the controls and options for a particular app don’t form part of the main window. This is a great idea for two different reasons.
First, we have a uniform toolbar interface across all apps which avoids a lot of confusion. Secondly, it saves screen real estate if you go full screen with the app. You will appreciate this if you have got a MacBook or MacBook Pro with a smaller screen.
Stability, Stability and More Stability
Your Mac come with more hardware power than most people will ever need. Consider my MacBook Pro for instance; it comes with a Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of RAM. Now with my PC, the maximum I had was an AMD dual core processor with 1GB RAM and most of the time I had trouble running more than three or four apps.
Because Apple design the hardware and the operating system, everything is finely tuned and optimized. A Mac is like a rocket ship in disguise when it comes to performance.
Thanks to a solid foundation of the OS, the computing experience is unhindered by crashes and BSODs (Blue Screen of Death). Even at an extreme scenario when an app does not respond, you can force quit them at will with no effect on the other software you’re running.
Final Thoughts
Except for a couple of quirks like the window control buttons to the far left, and using the command key instead of Control key for typical keyboard shortcuts, my Mac experience is dreamy and downright awesome.
To top it all, I can run Microsoft Windows side-by-side using Parallels or VMware, helping me swap over until I can cut the cord for good!
Are you a satisfied Mac switcher? Let us know what you love most about your Mac in the comments!