Chan's Personal Blog

Well, after developing three years on a G3 iMac at work, we finally got new eMacs. We started off with OS 9 on the old iMacs, and it was a pretty sketchy slow operating system. It had a time sharing operating system, which meant one thing could run at one time. Not being able to run things in the background was kind of annoying. We then put OS X onto the machines, which it was never meant to have, so the machines felt even slower. The screen was only a 15" monitor, and it jittered a lot which causes eye strain which is no good especially for programmers who spend a lot of time in front of a computer.

A G3 iMac:



I remember reading some joke articles about Mac computers in general, and they seem true. When you need to upgrade your Mac, you just throw it out. That's why the iMacs have a handle on the top, so you can easily chuck it out. The upgrade process was kind of neat. You take your old computer and link it to the new computer using Firewire, and it can automatically copy all your hard drive contents over! It was such a painless upgrade.

On an aside, there was this wierd myth at work where the staff thought we had these super powerful computers with super big screens. We infact had the slowest machines in the department! The other week we received technical requirements from a focus group of our users, and they demanded that all of our software screens fit in an 800X600 resolution screen. ??? I was shocked to see that because all of our users have faster machines with bigger screens, and 800X600 would seem miniature to them. A quick survey revealed that everyone in the department ran on 1024X768 resolution at least. They made this requirement because they thought we had computers with super large screens. Who comes up with this stuff?! Bah.

So anyways, today we received new eMacs for our development team. They run at 1GHz, so OS X actually runs at a decent speed now, so I'm happy. It also came with OS X 10.3 which comes with lots of neat pretty features. The biggest shocker was how relatively inexpensive these machines were (as far as Apple computers went). The old iMacs used to cost about $2,000 CDN a piece, these new eMacs cost about $1,000 CDN. That is a fairly affordable Mac.

A G4 eMac:



10 years ago, if you told me to buy a Mac, I would probably have laughed at you relentlessly, but Macs these days are getting fairly tempting. Here are some reasons I like it. Firstly, viruses, spyware, and such are pretty rare for Macs because hackers tend not to target them, and the operating system is pretty good security wise. The machines also NEVER crash, that's right... NEVER CRASH, unlike Windows.

For graphics and video, Macs are also pretty good as they have colour correction built-in, which means a graphic or video is going to look consistent across different Macs. What you see on the screen is what you get for photos. The same can't be said about PCs. These are pretty important features as I produce a lot of multimedia, and having colours look different on someone else's computer is very frustrating. The monitors that the Macs come with are also really bright and clean; they also don't produce a lot of glare, so it's really easy on the eyes. Macs also come with built-in firewire which works really well with digital video cameras and what not (firewire is a high-speed data port).

The main thing I like about OS X is that it has a UNIX layer underneath which is really good for hackers. There's a lot of open source products that were written for Linux or Unix, and they would probably work on a Mac. Programming in a UNIX environment is a pleasure.

I think the no-spyware, no-virus, never-crash feature of a Mac would be really good for non-technical people as they don't want to deal with that sort of thing. I think an ideal audience would be parents and grandparents who only need a computer to surf the web, write in a word processor, send e-mail, upload photos to family. If there is a problem on a Mac, then a geek could actually log into the Mac through the Internet, and try to figure out what's wrong. That's a great feature as I hate doing house calls for tech support. For $1,000 CDN, that's a pretty good deal for a solid computer.

So what's holding Chan back from switching to a Mac? Games. I was brought up as a PC gamer, and Macs have like 6 games available for them (I hear minesweeper just came out for it ). There are too many good games on the PC that I would have to leave behind if I were to migrate to a Mac. However, a Mac is fine for work since I don't play games at work.

When they start making serious games for the Mac, then I would consider ... if not, I stay on Winblows Windows. Although something like Linux would be a contender as well. (And no, I haven't become a chic Mac geek sipping $10 lattes in a fancy coffee store, wearing a French barrett, while reading the New York Times on my wireless $5,000 Mac PowerBook laptop.)