Mac Style

Please read Part I and Part II if you haven't already.

Mac OS X had the Unix element giving me access to all the reliability and command line glory that Linux provided, it also seemed to have the effort in design on behalf of the user. It even had support from companies like Palm to officially support the use of their hardware on that plaftorm, only since I started seriously using Linux did I realise the importance of this. It looked like a perfect solution, so I placed a request to get one from work.

I waited and waited. There was a shortage of PowerBooks at the time as Apple had just released the new hardware upgrades on the PowerBook specs. After around 4-5 weeks, it finally arrived.

I went down to the Apple Store, Next Byte, on Elizabeth Street in Melbourne to pick it up. I've noticed a few things about Apple Stores in comparison to your everyday computer store, firstly, cool people seem to frequent Apple Stores. It seems that the regular customers in small computer stores selling the usual beige PC, seem to attract geeks or people after the cheapest, nastiest hardware they can get. Apple Stores on the other hand, are full of normal, everyday, intelligent, cool kind of people. It was an interesting observation.

In fact, when I originally was talking to a salesman in the Apple Store, I was inquiring about the 17" PowerBook model. The salesman asked, "are you using it for design, or film?" I laughed and said "No, I'm a Linux Systems Administrator, my need to a high resolution screen is for more terminals!" I'm not sure he'd ever met anyone like me!

The whole experience reminded me of being a young boy in the Commodore shop, when my Dad bought our Commodore 128D. This was a store that was serious about delivering a quality experience to its customers. To me it was a high contrast to my experiences with small beige PC computer stores, they're just after a quick buck, and the Linux crowd seem to like coding but don't really care about usability much.

So, I took my PowerBook and started to learn how to use it. It is quite different from a PC, but I'm not getting the hang of it after a few weeks, and I've fallen in love with it. Luckily there was a guy in the office who had used Macs for a while, so he helped me out bit in getting started.

I'm very happy with my Mac, and I wouldn't go back, never. The extra cost is worth it, Apple really take care to deliver an excellent quality product. The Mac even have a quite healthy shareware scene with great, innovative software being written. I'm very. very happy.