After years of hearing about how great the Mac is, especially from the geek set, I finally went out and bought a MacBook Pro.
So far I’d have to say my experience is very mixed. Yes, it’s very stable and the Mac UI is nice, but some of the design decisions are very puzzling to me. For example, why is it so friggin’ hard to assign a shortcut key to, say, launch application X or open folder Y? And why the heck isn’t the delete key a shortcut for “Move to Trash?”
I’m also very disappointed in the lack of a truly integrated email/calendar/contacts client. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about Outlook vs., say, Eudora, but over the years I’ve developed a deep understanding of it and thus become something of an Outlook Ninja. It’s pretty much the center of my everday life. The reason? It’s really useful for closing loops between my email, contacts lists, task lists and calendar. I’ve mastered all the shortcut keys, so I often navigate around Outlook without even using a mouse. I assumed Entourage on the Mac would be a similar experience. Nope. It has all the same apps as Outlook, but the integration sucks. The worst part is, it’s not even easy to import my Outlook contacts into Entourage. In fact, it’s a gigantic pain in the ass, so much so that it may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and sends me back to XP (which, given the market penetration of Outlook, is a pretty smart yet evil strategy for Miscrosoft).
Speaking of which, people often rave about Apple’s own Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird, but I don’t see what the big deal is. They seem like pretty straightforward mail clients to me, not much improved from the state of the art five years ago.
Maybe it has to do with the way I practice Getting Things Done. In particular, I don’t keep a huge archive of messages. My inbox rarely has more than 3-4 messages in it, and that’s not because I filter everything into other folders. Usually I act on a message immediately, which generally means responding, assigning it to a task, filing it for reference (very judiciously – something has to be truly useful for me to keep it) or nuking it.
When I first made the cutover to GTD about four years ago, I was nervous about deleting so many messages. But since I did it, there have only been a handful of times where I couldn’t find what I needed (i.e. I had deleted a message with relevant info). And you know what I did? I asked the person or persons it related to for help. No harm, no foul, and in the interim I didn’t have piles of electronic noise staring me in the face when I did search for something I needed. For example, when I search for something involving the name of one of my investors, it doesn’t return every single frickin’ message we’ve exchanged over the years (because I deleted most of them), but only the ones that had information that may prove useful as reference material.
Back to the Macintosh. What about the other features, you ask? Well, Spotlight and Quicksilver are pretty cool, I suppose, though they don’t really seem like much improvement over Google desktop on the PC. iPhoto and iTunes are overrated IMO. Picasa on the PC is better than iPhoto. iTunes is decent on both the Mac and PC, but it’s really no better thanYahoo Music (though less buggy).
And I guess the biggest thing is lack of software. There is a lot of innovation going on righ now. And while there are some cool things for the Mac, there are still far more hackers developing stuff for the PC.
Ultimately, I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’ve built a highly customized environment on the PC over the years, and the Mac is throwing a major wrench in the works.
As an example of how idiosyncratic my PC environment is, I don’t have a desktop, A little known feature of Windows is that you can deactivate the desktop, so it only shows wallpaper and no programs or document icons. Instead of a cluttered desktop, I use a working folder for temporary projects I’m working on and another set of directories for permanent reference These are accessed via shortcut keys. If you abandon the desktop metaphor in favor of a little more structure optimized with shortcut keys, you find that screen real estate is no longer as important as it used to be.
I’ve toyed with the idea of moving everything to Gmail along with the GTD Gmail extension, but it’s ultimately a round peg in a square hole, and Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are limited, so Im forced to use the mouse way too often.
I’ll give my Mac a little time to grow on me and see if my habbits evolve, but the lack of a world class PIM is really bugging me. One saving grace is that I was able to replicate my Firefox environment pretty quickly thanks to Foxmarks.
I will say this, there are two things Apple nailed. One is a power transformer that is narrow enough to only take one space on a power strip. It’s so annoying when a 6-socket strip gets reduced to three becaue bulky transformers spill over onto unused sockets. The other is that the power jack on the computer is magnetized, so when you hook up the power cable there’s a satisfying click as they come together. The magnetic force has a quasi-magical feel to it that enhances the Mac mystique.
One last thing: Parallels is impressive technology, but it still sucks to start a virtual machine every time I want to run some of old PC apps.