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Mac vs. PC - My experience so far
For the last two months or so I’ve been using a Mac so I can be cool like the rest of the executives at my company. If you read my blog you know I’m not a huge Mac fan but I want to give an honest assessment of my Mac part 2 journey. Here we go…
Positives
Easy to use. Yes, Mac’s are easy to use but in my opinion PC’s are too. As a matter of fact, I have always questioned the intelligence of people who claim PC’s are hard or unintuitive to use.
Dock. I like the doc - it contributes to the overall ease of use of the system (system preferences are easy to navigate as well)
Expose/Hot corners. I love hot corners! What a great feature.
Keyboard.
iPhoto. iPhoto is a great application and I have enjoyed using it for photo editing.
Monitor. I love the monitor on my 15 inch MacBook Pro.
The Box. The machine is lightweight and slick.
Negatives
This machine is HOT. My MacBook gives off a ton of heat.
Battery. The battery life sucks bad.
Firefox/Safari. I think Firefox (yes, I know its not an Apple product) is way overblown for a browser and I think Safari is too light. A buddy sent me a hack for Chrome for OSX but I have yet to install it.
USB ports. My HP has four USB ports this Mac has two - lame! I can’t have my aircard, mouse, and camera plugged in at the same time. What gives?
Files. I hate the way Macs organize files. I think Windows is superior in this regard.
Office. Yeah, its a MS product and it sucks on a Mac. I’ve installed XP on this machine for spreadsheet work.
Exchange. The biggest thing I’ve missed is MS Exchange. Exchange is a brilliant productivity application. Its the best product MS has ever built. I find myself way more productive using Exchange. I can’t stand Mail and iCal is total garbage. I’ve been using Google Calendars instead but that has a long way to go as well.
Delete button. Ok the delete button on a Mac is the backspace button on a PC. Where is the delete button equivalent for the Mac? Is there a key command I can use? I really miss being able to delete from both directions. Help.
OSX Crashes. My Mac has crashed on me twice in two months. My Windows XP HP crashed on my twice in the last year. Yes, OSX does crash. I know…hard to believe.
Conclusion
Well that’s it so far. I think for work I’ll stick with my Mac. It does the job and it meets my expectations (which aren’t high). I’m learning more about it everyday and I’m putting up with the stuff I miss. The machine has some great things about it but I don’t think Macs are built with business productivity in mind.
I think Macs are a lot like voting for Obama - It has most of the same problems the other guy has but you’ll use it because a vote for Mac is a vote against PC 
(comments should be fun on this one)
Interesting comments. I’ll admit that I’ve become a bit of a Mac fan boy and now own two — an iMac and MacBook. I think that there are a few things that each does better. I’ll admit, I’m still learning, so I’m bound to get outed and proved wrong.
I love that when taking a music file off a thumb drive I can drag it straight to iTunes and the changes are in the root directory.
Start up and shut down time for my Macs is exponentially faster than my PC.
Exchange seems to work on both. Did you mean Outlook vs. Entourage?
Right click. Still can’t get enough of it on a PC. Yeah, you can do it with a mouse on a Mac, but not using the trackpad.
At the end of the day, it’s true that there is a trendy factor with a Mac, but overall for a consumer, the Mac is better.
Left by Clay on 11/10/2008Whenever I use a mac, I feel like somebody chopped my head off and put it on another body and I’m flopping around trying to figure out what nerves move what muscles like a new born baby. It literally gives me a headache.
Left by Bryan on 11/11/2008If you press the function key, then delete, it will act as a normal delete key… Also @Clay You can right click on the trackpad, you just need to enable it in the Trackpad preferences. You just put two fingers on the trackpad, and click and it will work as a right click.
Left by Jake Spurlock on 11/11/2008@ Jake
THANKS!
Left by Chris Knudsen on 11/11/2008It was interesting to read your experience with a MAC. I have been thinking of getting a MAC for the past few months but I am not so sure it would come up with my expectations. I have only tried a MAC for a couple of hours and it looked fine but simple tasks we do on a PC can’t be done on a MAC. I absolutely agree with you when you say you question one’s intelligence when they say PCs are unintuitive.
Left by Philip on 11/20/2008