I’m now on a Mac, oh yeah!
A couple of years ago if someone said I should get a mac I would say s/he was wrong, Macs are crap yadda yadda yadda. Last year I bought a cheap iBook for about £150 off of eBay, it was slow, nothing worked with it and I felt that it proved my opinions.
About a year later I bought an iPhone when it came out on Pay As You Go for £350. At the time I was really excited about having a new gadget and now about 6 months on I don’t think I could live without it.
Now I am not a Windows user, I gave up with Windows when they bought out Vista and knew that Windows was over. I moved to Ubuntu Linux, everything worked fast without problems, it looked great with technologies like Compiz, everything is free and open source, however it is not an operating system for a designer. It has some great software such as The Gimp but try opening a clients PSD design in The Gimp and you’ll realise you need to have Photoshop, which means you have to use Windows or Mac (I ran it in a virtual machine in the end).
Last Sunday I traveled to Manchester to the Apple store with the intention of buying my mac and about a week later I can see its attraction in the design community, its fast, everything works on it and software is written for it especially for designers, for example: Coda. I have been using it for just a few days and it makes my coding so much easier. Also having Photoshop running on the same operating system as everything else saves me so much time and because most of the popular software works on a Mac I’m able to test my clients sites in all the browsers without having to go onto virtual machines and other computers.
As you can see from the picture above, I bought the Mac Mini because I wanted to use my screen, keyboard and mouse (I really don’t like the Mac peripherals). So now I publicly retract my words about the Mac, its a great operating system (the systems are a bit overpriced though).
jp said on February 28th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I was also run out of Windows to Ubuntu after I tried Vista but I do run Windows on virtual machine. I also have macbook pro but I don’t really use it much because I don’t use Photoshop anymore so much. However, whenever I need to do something graphical Mac is my machine. Somehow font anti-aliasing and colors on mac are so much more better than on PC (Window or Linux) some says that ClearType on Windows is better than MacOS but I don’t really agree. For my eye Mac has the best graphics.
I would assume that years to come Macs are getting more and more popular on web developers and students because once you boot it you have everything on it. Python, Ruby, Apache etc. It is really nice piece of software and hardware. Though, I still going to stick with Linux due openness and price.
@chrisjlee said on June 24th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I agree. The peripherals are poor. I’m not sure whether i’m used to the keyboard or it’s just really uncomfortable.
I really also hate the help key on the mac. Utterly useless.
Nonetheless performance can be pretty stable and fast on the mac and easier to test: Like you’ve said.
Great work on the redesign btw.
@chrisjlee