Why I have a Mac
A friend gave me a long term loan on a Mac Mini in early December. At about the same time our home PC had a few minor hardware issues, so I temporarily switched our home computer over to a Mac. It is a "high end" Mac Mini with 1gb of RAM, 80gb of disk, and the faster processor option. It has OS X 10.4 (Tiger) which I reinstalled to start with a blank computer.
I've always been very impressed by the quality of Apple hardware and have wondered about using one of their machines as our home machine. This gave me the chance.
First Impressions and Good Stuff
OS X is really pretty. They spent a lot of time on animations and transitions that make basic operations look really cool. For instance fast user switching rotates my desktop away on a cube and shows my wife's desktop. The "Expose" feature shrinks all windows on my desktop and shows them all to me so that I can pick one with cool animations while it does it. The icons are nicely drawn and have richer colors than most Windows icons.
The Mac Mini hardware is great. I've only heard the fan turn on once and otherwise it is silent. It is small and looks nice. The box feels plenty fast for day to day operations and is exactly what a modern office PC should be like. In comparison my Windows PC (a 4 year old Shuttle XPC) is small by PC standards, but huge compared to the Mac Mini. The Shuttle XPC line is sold as being quiet but I had to make some hardware modifications to make it silent. The Mac Mini was basically silent out of the box.
Keyboard Control
You can't use the silly thing only with a keyboard. I have RSI injuries in my shoulder which make using a mouse continuously uncomfortable. I've never been a large mouse user and find the keyboard is usually both faster and more comfortable for most operations.
In all browsers on the PC I can use the Tab key to move between all links in a webpage. On the Mac the Tab key (at least in Safari and Firefox) only jumps between inputs, but I can't Tab to a link. The same is true in application dialogs.
On Windows there are generic keyboard accelerators which work in every application. I can press Alt to see an underlined letter for each menu telling me how to quickly open that menu. On the Mac there are accelerators for common functions (like save), but not for all functions. There is a magic key which gets me into the menu bar, but not fast accelerators. For instance on the PC I could select "Work Offline" in FireFox by pressing Alt-F, W. Once I pressed Alt the underlined letter in each menu item would tell me what the accelerator key was. On the Mac I press Control-F2 (the magic key sequence to get into the menus), F, <enter>, W <enter>. Four keystrokes vs. two. If there are multiple things that start with F then I need to keep pressing F to get to the right one.
I can't figure out how to start an application without using the mouse. On a Windows machine I can press the Windows key (or control-esc) to bring up the Start menu and select my application. If I know the name of my application I can just press Windows-R to bring up the "Run..." dialog and just type it's name.
I regularly use Windows without plugging in a mouse. This is not the normal way to do things, but the system is designed to allow it to be done. It would be nice to see Apple engineers working on a similar level of keyboard accessibility.
Dock
The Dock is sort of like the Windows Taskbar. It is a combo of the open windows section of the taskbar and the quickstart section in one. You see all of your normal apps in the Dock and running ones get a little triangle beneath them. Click an icon to open it, or click one with a triangle to see the open windows.
Like most OS X stuff is also pretty. Roll your mouse over the Dock and the icons under the mouse pointer get huge and show their title. While the Dock is really pretty I find it to be less useful to me than the Taskbar in Windows. I have three major complaints about the Dock.
The Dock doesn't allow me to see all of the windows which are open for a single application. If I want to find a browser window that I was using I need to click the Safari icon, then go to the Windows menu (clear on the other end of the display with the default Dock location) and then find my window in there. On a Windows machine I'd see an entry in the taskbar for each open window.
The Dock doesn't have menus, so I can't shuffle my lesser used applications off to a menu. I can click the Finder icon on the Dock, then browse the Applications Folder to find my application, but this is much less efficient. This results in making a cluttered Dock that has pointers to almost every installed application.
Applications don't quit when I close their last window (this makes some sense for performance). This gives two very distinct user experiences for clicking an icon in the dock. If the application is not running (no black triangle) then it comes up with a new window. The application is running but has no open windows then clicking the icon in the Dock only changes the menu bar, but does nothing else. This one really confused my wife (you close the browser, then two days later click on the icon and it doesn't open. What went wrong?).
iPhoto
We were throwing a party on the first day that I hooked up the Mac. I thought it would be cool to have it flipping through our photo collection, so I browsed over to our file server and imported all of our photos into iPhoto. After a few hours I returned and was surprised to see that they were only organized by date.
Our photos are stored on the server organized in directories. For instance my bicycle pictures live under a folder called photos\bicycles, hiking stuff is under photos\hiking, and you can find the pictures that I took yesterday of my basement under photos\house\basement-01-06. I expected that iPhoto would at least show me this universal structure to let me select which photos to show in a slideshow. It did not, everything just ended up in a large flat library.
I've also tried to use iPhoto with images coming off of my camera. The same thing happens, they end up stored in some magic place on the Mac (not what I want, I need them on the server) and I don't get to have any control over the directory structure. By default they just go into my library. So I've taken to using the Finder to copy images to the right place on my server, then telling iPhoto to rescan the server for the new images.
After importing photos from the camera into iPhoto I don't know how to delete them. In the "Preview" view (one photo on the screen) I can't drag them to the trash and there is no delete icon. If I have the photo in an album then I can right click and see "Delete from Album" but this doesn't delete it from the library.
If I'm in the thumbnail view I can drag the thumbnail to the trash and it makes a nice animation, but the thumbnail doesn't actually disappear. I've been deleting the images with the command line, not a very efficient way of doing it.
Finally iPhoto makes you export the photos to save your changes (such as rotating the image). One of the export options is to name the files after the title saved with the image. I can't figure out how to change the title. In the view menu I can see "View Titles", but I can't select it because it is grayed out. I've read the documentation and it tells me that I should use View Titles, but doesn't tell me under what conditions it is grayed out and how to make it work again.
Picasa on Windows is very similar to iPhoto at first glance, but covers all of these user issues much better for me. Even just using the Explorer on Windows provides a better experience where I can easily rotate my images, delete the ones that I don't like, control where I keep them, and rename their files.
I expect that iPhoto is better if I don't involve a server and don't try to import a large library of images. I can't reasonably test it that way because I do have a huge catalog of images and do want to save my new images into the same location as current ones.
Terminal
I spend much of my time on any computer in a ssh client connected back to my FreeBSD server at home. On there I run a text-based email client (Pine), use an irc client to keep in touch with friends, and have command line windows that I use for other purposes. The Mac is built on BSD so it was nice that it included a ssh client and has a pretty decent Terminal application.
I only have two minor nits with the Terminal app. The first is that the page up and page down keys move the scrollbar instead of sending the page up and page down commands to the application running inside the Terminal window. This is really annoying when running an email client inside that window.
The other is that I can't find a font that I like. On Windows I can turn on Cleartype and get very smooth fonts yet small which are easy for me to read for a long period of time. OS X doesn't have cleartype, but it does offer some anti-aliasing. The problem is that it isn't not as smooth and often smudges the characters so I can't see them very clearly. For instance I can't tell the difference between a period and a comma in the Terminal window.
Conclusions
I really like the hardware. I think the OS has some nice features, but the lack of good keyboard control makes it uncomfortable for me to use and slows me down quite a bit. I find the OS to be very pretty (and pretty is good) but much less efficient for me to use than my Windows machine.
I wouldn't be surprised if we own an Apple made computer someday, but I think I'll run Windows on it.
I am disappointed. I really wanted to like OS X. I've been using BSD (the underlying system that OS X is built on) for 15 years on a daily basis and feel very comfortable in it. The idea of a BSD system with a nice UI that my wife is comfortable in was really appealing. In the end I didn't find that and Christine is asking when she can have her old PC back.
Disclaimer
It isn't a big secret that I work at Microsoft. However I try not to let this get in the way of what I purchase for personal use. The last portable audio player that I bought was an iPod, not something which used Microsoft technology. Two of the key computers in our house are running FreeBSD. I keep my music stored in MP3 and FLAC files, not WMA. All of these decisions were made because I want to use the best option available, not the option which helps my employer or stock price.
I don't work on the Windows OS or work on anything related to user interface (I build email server software).