Immanence
What the Macintosh does get right
My experience as a former Gentooer who uses Macintoshes (a desktop and a notebook) at home and Windows XP at work (a desktop and a notebook, too) is that Windows’ UI is vastly more convenient for most of the tasks I like or need to do on a computer. What Windows gets wrong is that it’s not reliable. Everyone is acquainted with the Windows “rotting” phenomenon — all machines get to a point where Windows needs to be reinstalled. I don’t believe there’s anybody who trusts the Windows filesystem on a hard drive as a viable backup medium. Multimedia on Windows is often flimsy — will that webcam work? Is sound recording functioning properly or is something in the mixer “wrong” for some reason?
Oh, and don’t bring up the Unices. Even the most user-friendly Linux distributions can’t get minimal multimedia to work reliably. Yes, I know proper back-up servers run an Unix, probably one of the Free as in Freedom ones by now. They also have a full-time sysadmin at the very least.
My old Mac mini is running headless as a backup server now. I never even changed anything, I just got it on the network and drop stuff I don’t want to lose there. (The very important stuff gets burned to CD-Rs, but managing piles of CD-Rs is somewhat unreliable as well). The webcam will work — it’s built-in, and so is the microphone, and I don’t worry about mixer fuckups. I can actually use the voice commentary feature of Microsoft Word — I’ll be working on my laptop on a hammock outside, click the “comment here” button and just start speaking. My mini has been up for countless months, headless — occupying a spot next to the similarly sized med box on the table. The Macbook only gets rebooted on OS updates — even if I wear the battery out to zero on the road, it’ll hibernate and save state fine. I often leave large documents unsaved on the Macbook, simply trusting it not to crash. Windows XP can save state to HD and reboot to it, but would you trust it to keep unsaved documents for long?
The Macintosh isn’t “easier to use” overall — though the excellent bundled multimedia apps make it appear so –
but it’s reliable. It gives me peace of mind. It’s like if it wasn’t a computer, with all the woes and shared stories of lost work and time spent in maintenance passing around any office.
What makes the Macintosh different is that it’s not really there.
Breadcrumb trails:
backup server, Blog, HTML, Indo, Linux, Mac, Macintosh, Microsoft, Nome, Peace, Perl, Phenomenon, Porta, Running, stuff, UnixRelated posts:
Tags: Categories
TwitterCounter
Discussion
No comments for “What the Macintosh does get right”
Post a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.