As I mentioned previously in, Everything Changes, I switched from PC to Mac about two months ago. I’m still just as excited about it every time I turn it on as the first day, so I’ve compiled a list of what I love about my Mac. By the way, I previously used linux as my sole computer for almost five years and Windows before that every year since it came out.
These are only in the order I thought of them…too hard to order them:
- Ability to use a PC keyboard seamlessly (maybe I’ll write later about why I prefer this, and I tried the Mac keyboard for a month before switching)
- Quicklook
- TextMate (have to save the wows on this for another post, too many to list – goodbye eclipse, netbeans, texteditor, notepad++, text wrangler, sql tool and wordpress blog gui)
- Adium (better than gaim, trillian, gtalk, etc)
- Auto mute when I take out my headset (just like I asked for last year)
- Mighty Mouse (best mouse I’ve ever used)
- Ability to use external monitors (love my Gateway FPD2275W, 22″ DVI-D with built-in 4 port USB 2 hub and PIP)
- Font rendering (improves the entire Internet browsing experience)
- Fluid (use this for bloglines, remember the milk, gmail)
- Unix underneath
- Running Windows on VMWare Fusion (when I unfortunately need to test something in Windows, but at least rebooting is not as painful and it seems more stable)
- Quicksilver
- Coverflow in Finder
- Finder’s 3 pane folder view (genius!)
- Dashboard
- Intel Dual Core
- Slick, streamlined case, and lightweight
- Cheap memory upgrade (through crucial.com of course)
- Firefox never crashes! (well, maybe on occasion, but it crashed consistently before)
- Hardware just works, from bluetooth devices to external usbs and hard drives
- Wifi just works (don’t get me started on Linux and wifi)
- iMovie and ease of using digital video cameras…plugged it in and iMovie sucked all the video in, with thumbnail generations, and sorted all the clips by date!
- Auto recognition of other devices on the network (lets see how do I connect to that linux server, hmm never done this, oh wait, why is it listed in the finder already…it already found it!)
- iSight, easy video chatting and recording
- the dock (love Mac’s take on this)
- Expose!
- Using external monitor as the primary and laptop screen as secondary monitor
- Running everything all at the same time while watching full screen video (on the laptop screen), running mongrel/Rails, mysql, textmate, firefox, and no problems!
- FrontRow
- Controlling my Mac with Ruby (instead of ActionScript…but haven’t actually tried it yet)
- Easy VNC with Vine Server
- Super easy installs (ugh, goodbye linux install tools, and command line builds) and uninstalls
- Small well-designed power brick, with fold out plug (don’t even need the 2nd part of the typical plug and brick)
- Being able to test my web development on all the main browsers on my laptop: IE 5 – 7, Safari on win/mac, Firefox 2/3 on Win/mac (see Running Multiple Browsers for Testing)
- The remote control
- Long battery life, excellent battery conservation when unplugged
- AppFresh
- Force quit
- Overall feeling that everything is more intuitive, more stable, and better integrated