Tim's Weblog
Tim Strehle’s links and thoughts on Web apps, software development and Digital Asset Management, since 2002.
2008-02-01

Switch: One year later

One year after the Switch, I'm still quite happy with my MacBook Pro (now running Leopard). Although it took me a couple of weeks to get accustomed to the differences in keyboard layout (@, Cmd vs. Ctrl, brackets etc.)...

Pros:

  • very beautiful, thoughtfully designed (and fast) hardware and software, great user experience
  • changing networks and plugging/unplugging external displays just works (some of these things required reboots on my Windows laptop)
  • Unix command line, Mac GUI, Windows VMs - definitely the best of all three worlds
  • Spotlight, Finder, Quick Look and the ubiquitous PDF support are a huge advantage over Windows
  • I like TextWrangler and iTerm better than similar free software that's available for Windows
  • high fun factor; kids love Photo Booth

Cons:

  • not crash-free; it's freezed and crashed as often as my Windows XP laptop (although most of the problems seemed to be caused by the third-party ISDN adapter driver)
  • it loses the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse every two or three days, I have to search for it via System Preferences (how would you do that on an iMac when your only mouse is not working?)
  • the screen cannot be opened wide enough for an optimal viewing angle (my old Acer laptop screen could be opened 180 degrees)
  • no free VMware Player and no VMware Console for the Mac (but Fusion is cheaper than Workstation)

Here's the software I'm actually using:

Interesting: Just 13 months ago (as it has been for more than ten years), every laptop and desktop computer in our company was running Windows (with Linux servers and a few Macs for testing). Today one third of the company works on a Mac...