When I left the IT consulting industry 6 months ago and retired into the mountains of Panamá, I decided, after 18 years of working with PCs and Microsoft technologies, to make the move to Apple’s Macs. The main reason was that I wanted change, try out “the other side” if you will, and also because I do a lot of photography and Macs are known as the favoured choice of pro photographers and graphic artists.

I would say that overall it’s been a very positive experience. However, it has also confirmed what I have always believed: claims about the greatness of Mac/OS-X are just as exaggerated as the denigrations of PCs/Windows are. Neither side is perfect, and both have pluses and minuses. I think Apple makes great designs with excellent attention to details right down to the packaging, and they are geniuses at marketing and creating a whole user experience that makes people desire Apple’s stuff and creates a religious-like group of followers. (And Microsoft’s marketing has always sucked, and probably always will). I also think that Apple sometimes goes too far and puts design ahead of function.

IMac: I love the design of the iMac: a really beautiful and solid machine and the 24″ screen is fantastic. Very few PCs even approach that kind of quality, but then they cost less than half as much. Looks great in my living-room and makes an excellent platform for watching DVDs and downloaded movies or TV shows. The sound is impressively good, especially for voices. The keyboard is made of a thin slab of aluminum and is gorgeous and feels very solid, but at the cost of ergonomics: the feel of the keys is particularly substandard and I am just now (after 6 months) getting used to it and no longer missing many keystrokes. While Microsoft’s keyboards are plasticky and boring in comparison, they provide far better ergonomics and feel. Same goes for that cute mouse. Very pretty and cool looking, but it doesn’t track well on smooth surfaces and it offers no hand support which has caused my carpal-tunnel inflammation to flare back up. I loved the tiny scroll-ball but it stopped working in the down direction after 3 months. I was pleased to find out that my good old Logitech wireless mouse works just fine on the Mac and now I’m a happy mouser again. The tiny Apple Remote is brilliant in its simplicity and usability especially when used with Front Row. Overall a very good and beautiful machine.

17″ MacBook Pro: This is a stunning machine. The aluminum construction is fantastic: it is solid, smooth, thin and light. The matte screen is gorgeous and amazingly bright, the performance is excellent, the multi-touch scroll-pad is brilliant, and the battery life is outstanding. While it costs twice as much as a similarly equipped PC laptop, I think it was well worth it since nothing else really compares. The backlit keyboard is incredibly useful and something I couldn’t live without anymore. However, I can’t figure out for the life of me why Apple left out the Home/End/PageUp/PageDown/Delete keys when there is so much keyboard real-estate left on that machine. I am getting used to the combination key-stroke equivalents, but I still really miss those keys and it makes switching between the iMac and the MacBook Pro more difficult. I think it’s a really stupid mistake on Apple’s part. I also wish there was a USB port on the right-hand side but that is a minor issue. The Mag-Safe power port is a great idea although a bit too easy to pull out by accident. Overall I love this machine. If they added the missing keys back, it would be a perfect laptop!

Mac OS-X: This is probably the greatest disappointment. I would say it is only slightly better than Windows; not vastly superior as we oftenhear. I find it’s not much more stable than Windows and updates come out just as often. I often have programs blow up on me, at least as often as in Windows if not more. Even the finder has crapped out on me a couple of times, forcing me to reboot. While I love Safari 4, it regularly just exits on me: no warning, no error message, and this is with the final version.  I thought iTunes for OS-X would be much less buggy than iTunes for Windows but it is only slightly better. When my Apple TV synchs up, the OS on the iMac becomes so bogged-down it is nearly unusable, not even registering keystrokes and mouse clicks. This is unacceptable for a modern multi-tasking OS. While the usability and refinement of the UI is generally better than Windows’, I find many puzzling exceptions to that rule. Why can we only resize windows from the bottom right corner? This means when a window is in the bottom-right corner, you first have to move it before you can resize it. In Windows you can grab any window edge and resize it. Why did Apple choose to use the Command key instead of the Control key for things like Control-X/C/V? Seems it would have made sense to be consistent with Windows and Linux. When you click on a column header in a grid to re-sort on that column, why are you sent back to the top instead of being kept on the previously highlighted row? Having the application menus on the top OS bar instead of on the active window drives me nuts. It is often confusing and it also forces you to do a whole lot of unnecessary mouse traveling. This is especially bothersome and wasteful on a large high-resolution screen. I think this is a left-over from Apple’s OS-9 which wasn’t a true multi-tasking OS but rather a task-switching OS, in which case it made more sense to have a context menu bar at the top. I also find that many programs will not register button-clicks if they are not the active window, but this isn’t consistent. Sometimes dialogs pop-up behind windows, sending me on a hunt to find them, or making it appear like the application has locked-up. Sometimes when dialogs pop-up the insertion point is not set on any of the dialog’s text boxes (this is reminiscent of some flavours of Linux), and sometimes even when the insertion point is inside a box, keystrokes don’t register and I may have to click in and out of the text box several times before I can start typing ( i have narrowed this issue down to Firefox). Ever since the latest OS update (May 18th), shut-down behaviour has been unpredictable. I often can’t shut down because Skype or iTunes or some other program refuses to shutdown. Once, the Finder locked-up as I was trying to shut-down and the whole machine was frozen, forcing me to do a hardware re-boot. I also dislike having to right-click and select “send to trash” when simply hitting the delete key would be much faster. I know the OS is trying to protect me from accidentally deleting files, but is it not why there is a Trashcan file-recovery system in the first place? The way Apple handles switching spell-check dictionaries is down-right stupid, unproductive and anti-usability. I actually had to go search online to find out how to do it as it is buried into a very unlikely place. Since I regularly switch between English, French and Spanish, it drives me nuts!!! Why do we still have to eject USB drives and such things before disconnecting them? Windows stopped requiring that back with XP. I lost many files once when I copied a folder over an existing one. It warned me about overwriting the folder, but since the files that were in the dragged folder were newer I said go ahead and overwrite them. To my dismay, OS-X actually overwrote at the folder level instead of just overwriting the files that I was copying in the folder, so it effectively erased thousands of music files off of my NAS. Thankfully I had a backup.

On a more positive note, I love the Finder, Dock, Spaces, Spotlight, Front Row, zooming in and out, not having to explicitly “save” in most option dialogs, the way OS-X handles wireless networks, the less obtrusive administrator credentials check, and the neat home productivity software bundles (iLife and iWork). I was surprised by how good and usable the iWork suite is, although I ended up switching to the more powerful, free and Office-compatible OpenOffice. One usability issue in iWork: why can’t you just save a file to PDF? Burying the Save as PDF functionality in the print dialog is counter-intuitive. I do find that Adobe Photoshop runs quite a bit better on my Macs than it did in Windows, but then I upgraded from CS3 to CS4 as I made the switch to Macs, so it is hard to tell where the differences really came from. Another very strong point is the synergy between Apple’s various products: they work very smoothly together, as it should be.

Despite all the negative comments, it has been a positive experience and I don’t regret the move. But I think my findings demonstrate that Apple’s great superiority over Microsoft is highly overstated. It is due more to a cult-like religious faith than to reality-based facts. Kudos to Apple for achieving such a loyal and dedicated customer following. As I’ve said many times before: Apple’s greatest strengths lie in hardware design and marketing, not in software. Superb machines (but at a price) and excellent although not vastly superior OS.

I will probably catch a lot of flack from fans on both sides…