My Take on Mac vs. PC
At Broadchoice, everyone uses a Mac. Except me. In fact, it seems like just about everyone in the programming world is jumping onto the Mac bandwagon. Which is fine, I say use whatever you think works best for you. However, that's usually not good enough. When I tell someone I work on an XP box, the floodgates of hate open! Well, not really HATE, but people sure are happy to let you know what they think of Windows and why Macs are so utterly superior. And I've got to tell you, it makes me feel like this:
It can be downright depressing being a "poor PC guy"! It might be blasphemy in this day and age, but I like my PC. It runs just fine. It never crashes. I've got everything set up on it just how I want it, and I'm talking about a lot of stuff: games, development tools, servers (ColdFusion, JBoss, etc.), databases, and all the rest. I don't really want to have to go through all that effort again just to say I'm working off a Mac. Plus, not to brag, but my PC is a monster. 500 GB RAID 0, 4 GB RAM, 4 GHz dual-core Athlon 64, dual GeForce 8600's. And for display:
Yes, that is three 19 inch LCDs. And I use them all, all of the time. I know the Mac has Spaces but its not the same thing. I can actually see everything instead of having to switch to different spaces. I know that I am completely spoiled by this setup but it results in very high productivity for me.
Now compare that to the admittedly very nice Macbook Pro that Broadchoice set me up with:
Yes, it's very nice. Yes, I like OS X. I have nothing against Macs, it's just not my preference. I have this set up with my basic tools and applications. I use it when I'm traveling or presenting, or whenever I'm not at my desk. But surely it wouldn't surprise anyone that I would prefer to work on my very well-appointed PC workstation than on this 15" Macbook.
So please Mac folks, stop giving people the third degree just because they are actually fine working on a PC! I get it, you love your Macs. But seriously, the attitude is starting to go from enthusiastic to arrogant and overbearing.
So I'll open the floodgates to see what the Mac folks have to say, as well as to see if there are any other PC users who feel like they are supposed to be ashamed of daring to use a Windows-based system.
Vista is doing pretty good for me... not perfect but I find it is good. The issues aren't worth askin' daddy Jobs to consider me for adoption for sure!
Its a computer and if its set up how you like it and makes you productive who cares about the rest of it!
Oh, and if you have no use for that MacBook I can find something to do with it! ;)
But its all about what you're comfortable with. Me? I'm a command-line guy. Unix rules! But I also do video editing. FCP rules. And I love Textmate.
@John: That's the thing, I honestly don't see the Mac as a better alternative. I see it as a different alternative that may suit some people.
@Roland: Very nice, but the issue isn't specifically whether I could work off a laptop because I'm sure I could if I put effort into setting everything up that way. The issue is more about the perception that somehow a PC is actually inferior to a Mac, which I still see no actual evidence of other than personal preference.
@Sam: Oh, I use the Macbook, I like it a lot. It just isn't my primary workstation.
ps: just kidding, lovely article.
ps2: Actually I'm Bill Gates pretending to be Steve.
Question though, I've been trying to understand XP's RAM capacity. I thought it couldn't use anything over 2GB and you had to have Vista 64 bit to actually use 3 or 4GB. I'm only basing this on a conversation or two with people I'm not sure they know what they're talking about. Maybe someone has a link or some insight to help me understand...
Admittedly, moving from PC to Mac can be a difficult transition and if you are happy with your PC then that's cool. Me? I wanted a laptop and honestly, I think Apple makes some of the best laptops in the industry. However, the hype is a bit over the top...they aren't perfect. My 3 month old MB Pro died on me the other day (turned out to be bad RAM) and my MB is in the shop for other issues (it turns off randomly). Still, in general they are good machines and OSX (once you get used to it) is much nicer than Windows.
I have to say I envy you a little. Where I work, it's the exact opposite--I'm considered the nut job for owning a Macbook. "No serious programmer uses a Mac" is what I've heard. They are very Microsoft-centric here.
Up until last year when I finally ditched my PC's, I had four Windows boxes running at my house, all networked, and one was a development box. I know PC's--I've used one every day of my life for the past ten years. I personally just got weary and wanted something new. Mac OSX is truly wonderful and I always look forward to getting on my laptop after working in Windows all day. But, I still know how to do DOS command line stuff and use it when I have to.
I think Mac users get so defensive and "obnoxious" because we're tired of Windows getting shoved down our throats. I know for me, I get tired of fixing everyone in my family's Windows PC that's corrupted and/or full of viruses! I just want to tell them to buy a Mac!
I been on Vista 64 bit for a while and I like it. I'm not against Macs at all, they are solid machines which a nice OS. But, I built my system for half the price of a similarly configured Mac and I find that reason enough to stay with my OS. Sure, I'm not part of the cool crowd now, but as everyone who follows my blog posts and comments knows I've never been a follower anyway ;)
dual 2.4Ghz Intel
4GB RAM
600GB RAID 1 storage (hardware RAID)
7950 GTS NVidia 512MB video (ya, it's old, but who has time to play video games anymore?)
@Brian: Oh there is no doubt that Mac laptops are very sweet. It's probably an issue of me using XP for many years, but I don't think OS X is much nicer than Windows. It LOOKS nicer. There are some things that I think are cool about it. But there are plenty of things that bug me about it as well. You're right, they aren't perfect. ;-)
@Dominick: Er, maybe you missed the whole point, which is that I *don't have* a dual display for my Macbook, and that I want to use my three monitor setup? For bootup, first, my system takes maybe 60 seconds to boot. Second, I reboot it about once a month, so this isn't even remotely a concern. For malware, I have never gotten a virus or any malware on my system. Maybe I just know what I am doing compared to the bulk of Windows users, but this is also not an issue to me.
What I need is CF8 (64 bit), MySQL, Eclipse and I can easily let you know that it works better than a PC.
I need also SQL Server for some projects and I am connecting to the network server for it. At home I have another PC running which has all these bulk stuff and I do not need to install any SQL Server. I also have WinXP via VMWare Fusion and it also works like another machine with bridged network and it is also another way to reach old win stuff. But as I said, I do not need it unless I am on the way.
All my VPN and RDP tools works as expected also. Networking is better than a Win box and you can reach network resources better than any Win box.
But the most important part for me is the hardware. Please try to get a PC notebook with same hardware from Dell etc. and you will see also the price "myth".
At the end, we are professionals and we should select the "tool" which works for us. :)
Don't let them harass you for using PC... just say "games". heh..
It is interesting to see the tables turn, but I totally understand how it's a PITA. Next time you're in charge you can make the rule "You can use any setup you want as long as you get the job done" - I tend to use that rule when I am in charge (which is rare now a days :D)
Good luck
But yes. I try to stay out of ALL religious debates, and operating system is the least interesting to me.
--- Ben
For me the pc is working well, with all my little tools that i will never find for mac (and for the productivity, don't change a winning team !)
Just for mac guys, mac is cool, it's nice to use, cool, pc too =)
purhaps, one day we will be abble to install mac os on pc, and then purhaps i will try to use both. but For the moment, the power of the mac laptops sux compare to pc (in point of hardware i mean).
Today is a big day ! Pc 1 - Mac 0 =)
We deploy to Linux and build on Macs so our development environment assumes Apache and ant - and may depend on other Unix tools in the future :)
OS X comes with svn, perl, ruby, php, python, tcl, and of course grep/awk/etc.
There's also Preview.app that can open essentially every graphic format you can think of (pdf, psd, ia, etc.), so if you don't happen to have the creative suite, or you need to open something really fast, that comes in handy a lot. Being able to screen shot tiny portions of the screen (Shift+Apple+4), or arbitrary UI controls (Shift+Apple+4 then Space) is also quite useful. This of course is more designer centric though.
System wide spellchecking and grammar checking is also a god send for me.
You can install all of that on Windows with third parties tools though, and with cygwin (or some alternative) you can install *nix toolchain for the most part. And if you use Firefox you already have spellchecking there, and certainly if you use an office product, or a spellchecking plugin for Eclipse.
I've definitely seen the usage of this stuff as a big difference from the Windows developers to the *nix world developers.
All my tooling is done in scripts written in some language (it varies depending on what I'm doing, but I use bash and ruby a lot), but this seems very rare in the CF world. To most CF developers this is totally foreign because they grew up in Windows and haven't really been exposed the scripting world of *nix, so they use something like ANT and develop in Eclipse with lots of plugins which makes using OS X less meaningful because you neglect all the tools below it.
So really, if all you do is develop in Eclipse, use ANT and deploy on apache, are you gaining very much by switching to the Mac? Probably not. OS X is nice, and I personally prefer it, but it's not /that/ special compared to Windows at the UI level. Sometimes it's even much worse (Finder at least got better in 10.5, but it's still a hobbled mess, Explorer is definitely more powerful).
I'd urge you to try and get accustomed to the Terminal and using the command line. That's where the real magic is. If you spend your whole day in Eclipse, Firefox, Office and a few random excursions to the Finder, as a developer, I don't think you're gaining much.
In any case, writing software is art, use the easel that works for you, not the one that other people tell you is better. :)
@CR You CAN run OS-X on a PC, it's just not legal. ;-)
Chris
Overall, I would not give up a powerful Windows setup like yours for a Mac laptop. Its still nice to have a Mac always.
At the moment I don't have a MB Pro, but would love to have one. In a word: Parallels.
In my previous job, I'd hook up my MB Pro to a nice, big Mac monitor, fire up Parallels with Win XP Pro, open up Eclipse/CF8/SQL Server 2005 Express on Windows for dev work (server were Windows, but if they were *nix-based, then most of my dev work would be done in OSX). Email, IM and graphics types stuff would be done on the Mac; dev work would be done on Windows (Win XP ran on the big monitor, of course).
And the best part is that I could test dev work in all browsers on both platforms without having to wait for QA testing.
Parallels is the compelling reason to switch to Mac, and since it covers all bases, I don't really see a reason not to switch (unless of course budget is a concern ;-)
btw - your blog software doesn't properly accept plus(+) signs in email addresses.
Also I agree with everyone about the toolchain. here's a recent example, I just got into Antlr, and mac comes with it by default. I understand that I can go get it and download it, but it's nice to not have to. Same thing with Ant and well the list goes on. In terms of startup, I spent a good amount of time fixing computers hen I was in college. Yeah, throwing ram at the computer would help, but the number once complaint I would hear was make my computer start up faster. In addition, I called up my Alienware rep and let them know that my internal nic wasn't working and they said it was a known problem with Vista. I ended up having to bring an external adapter with me everywhere. Not to mention that I paid top dollar for it and it didn't even come with a built in camera! Can you imagine the looks I got at some of these conferences as I hooked up an external camera!!! ;) sigh... i like that the mac comes with all this stuff by default. In addition, I don't know how many times I've already pulled that magnet power cord out on accident. Every time i do, I just think "brilliant". In fact, I don't even have to look to plug it in.. it just snaps back on.
Now, as I said before... I sounded much like Ben Forta about a year ago and said I'd never switch to a mac. I loved pc and still have 4 of them, but after getting used to the mac, i was sold in about 2 weeks. I do have my windows boxes as well though, so I'm fairly comfortable.
Here's the things that kill me about the mac!!!!
Java 5 is default and when I bought it they didn't even have Java 6!!!!
You can't cut-copy-paste!!!!! <-- this was unimaginable! (you have to drag to another folder) crap!
Front Row pops up sometimes when i hit a wrong key! and it takes a second or two!
There is no "decent" screen capture software like camtasia or captivate
"don't tell me Jing! 4 minutes my ass"
There are other problems i have with it, but again, this is just to point out that I do see the positives and the negatives.
hate to tell you this but you've made a mistake on your photo. You've got the labels reversed.
;)
larry
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/th2...
I have 2 22" LCDs (it can support 2 x 1920x1200 or 3 x 1280x1024) IN ADDITION to the 15" laptop LCD. So you could actually have 4 displays with your Mac :-)