So after the last couple days of working on the Mac, here’s my critique of the Mac itself, as an environment to work and develop in.  Again, these are preliminary thoughts.

I used a miniMac, 1.25 Ghz, 512MB RAM, running OS-X 10.3.9, spending time primarily in the Xcode development environment.

The Good:

Aesthetics.  The miniMac looks awesome.  It’s very small – probably 5% of the volume of the Compaq I have it sitting on.  It’s also very quiet – if it makes any noise at all, I can’t hear it, as the Compaq drowns it out.

It just works.  My general setup experience with it was very simple – my only real problems were with 3^rd party hardware I tried to use with it (A Belkin KVM that was lousy and a hub that got fried in a thunderstorm.)  I was able to network it to my PC, though that was slightly more cumbersome (owing as much to issues in setting up my PC for sharing as anything else).

Speed.  Although it‘s only a 1.25Mhz machine with a 4200 RPM hard drive, the U.I. was always plenty fast and responsive, and compiling things within XCode was plenty fast too.  Perhaps a larger project would have caused a more noticeable speed hit, but I suspect that for 90% of users out there, a 1.25Mhz miniMac is all they need.  It was as responsive as my 3.0 Ghz Compaq.

The Bad:

Desktop navigation.  The task bar in Windows works better than the Dock/Expose combo on the Mac.  By default, the Dock is too big and takes up too much room.  I tend to have a lot of windows open at a time 5-8 is typical for me.  On a PC, it’s easy to see what you have open and select it on the task bar.  Plus, you can easily minimize everything and get at your desktop icons.  But on the Mac, the dock is not as intuitive to use to access applications buried behind other windows (it depends primarily on icons rather than words, but words are easier to, well, read).  Expose is clever but a bit slow for switching tasks, and it’s no help in accessing icons on the desktop. 

Keyboard shortcuts.  I’m very accustomed to Windows keyboard shortcuts, and rely heavily on combinations of Shift, Control, the arrow keys, and Insert/Delete/Home/End/Page Up/Page Down to navigate documents and select text.  Many of these are assigned different meanings on the Mac, so my typing productivity is much lower.  I found a help page here that supposedly tells how to set Mac key bindings up like Windows key bindings, but the process, as explained, did not work for me at all (I created the folder and file and pasted the text in, but it didn’t work for me).  If anyone can help me resolve this, I’d appreciate it (does the tilde in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict stand for my home user directory?)

On-line support.  There’s a lot more PC users out there in the world, and a lot more on-line info geared towards that big audience.  Whereas I can generally locate a reasonable solution for any tech problem on Windows with a little Google-fu, I was much less successful in Googling for Mac solutions.

Overall:

I was sorta hoping that I would find the Mac to be some sort of super productivity improver – that perhaps if I really got into it I might move up to a beefier Power Mac and make that my primary development machine.  But while the Mac beats the PC in some areas, it loses in just as many others.  Overall, I’m ambivalent about the Mac.  It’s a nice computer, but I don’t expect to be a full-time ‘switcher’ anytime soon.