Why I love my Mac

by Elena Blanco on 19 September 2005 , last updated

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Introduction

It is a well known fact that people who have Macs love them. Non-believers might even say they get a bit evangelical. It’s a bit like people who drive Skodas. They have always been fantastically brand loyal but somehow it has suddenly become a pretty cool brand outside its traditional customer base. In the same way that a Skoda is a VW underneath the paint, Mac OS X brought us a Unix desktop with an exceptional paint job. The result is that the Mac has become the Unix desktop I always wanted.

OS X

To my mind the biggest problem with all those Linux distributions out there is that no-one has yet cracked the GUI problem. How do you give the user a desktop environment of the same quality as the underlying operating system? My background is as a Unix sysdamin. No-one needs to convince me of the qualities of a Unix operating system. I do, however, believe that Unix for the desktop, rather than the back office, falls woefully short when it comes to the user experience. Yes there are desktop environments available. GNOME and KDE certainly have their fans, but I’m not one of them. The first time I saw Mac OS X though, it blew me away. Perhaps it was inevitable that a Mac user would say this but it Just Works. And as if that wasn’t enough, it looks fantastic whilst it is Just Working.

The care and attention to detail evident in the look and feel of Mac OS X is staggering. It is no coincidence that Apple have a stronghold in the creative industries. These are people who make careers out of aesthetics. So it’s natural that they would pick a computing platform made by people who care about the same things. Outside this specialised community, some people remain totally unaffected by the look and feel of their computing environment. They do not have strong feelings either way. These people are unlikely to ever do anything other than go with the flow. They’ll use whatever GUI is put in front of them. Some people go further still and think that using anything other than the command line somehow marks you out as a lesser being. These people will rarely be interested in a GUI and clearly do not represent the views of the majority. Of course the command line has its place but that place is not as the desktop of an end user.

Hardware

Apple’s heavy commitment to the aesthetic design of its products also extends to its hardware. It may be expensive when compared to a commodity Intel box but that is like comparing a Jaguar to a Vauxhall, they are bought by people with different criteria.

Now, I love my Mac because I love the whole package: Apple hardware with Mac OS X. However, there are those who are not quite ready to leave the Windows operating system that they have become accustomed to but they might want to get to know OS X without switching lock, stock, and barrel on day one. There are others still who have been won over by the beautifully designed and engineered Apple hardware rather than Mac OS X itself. Recent developments at Apple mean that these people now have the path they wanted and that path is called Boot Camp. Boot Camp is the name of the component from Mac OS X that allows a Mac computer ro run Windows XP operating system alongside the Apple operating system. Boot Camp is included in the last release of Mac OS X, called Leopard.

If the idea of running Windows on a Mac sounds like an unexpected hybrid then how about out the idea of using a Mac that has an Intel processor? Up until early 2006 all Macs used the PowerPC processor but now it is possible to buy Macs that use the new Intel Core Duo processor. This was a major departure for Apple to offer Macs using an Intel architecture but in so doing they can now take advantage of the fact that Intel is at the leading edge of processor development. Now Mac users can enjoy the benefit of having the very latest and fastest processors.

Open source

But Mac OS X is not open source I hear you cry? That’s right, it’s not. However, components of Mac OS X are open source and Apple as a company is committed to the open source development model. Darwin, the Unix core of Mac OS X is made available under the Apple Public Source License, an OSI-certified licence. WebCore, the HTML rendering engine at the heart of Apple’s web browser, Safari, is open source software that is part of the KDE project. Similarly, JavaScriptCore, the JavaScript rendering engine within Safari, is also part of the KDE project. Both of these browser engine components are made available individually under the Lesser GNU Public License and are also bundled together in the framework known as WebKit under a BSD-style licence. Apple has encouraged the formation of a large developer community where Apple engineers and the open source community collaborate on a variety of projects, most notably on Darwin, the core of Mac OS X. The Apple website tells us that Apple believes the open source development model is the most effective for certain types of software. In particular they stress the importance of the peer review process in the effort to make the underlying operating system both robust and secure.

Whether or not Apple’s commitment to open source is a factor in your choice of desktop, I believe that it is the best Unix-like environment when we consider the user experience as well as the underlying operating system. In exactly the same way as Windows users can, Mac users can use open source applications on top of their proprietary operating system. In fact, since Mac OS X is Unix, it is even easier for us to use open source applications than it is for Windows users as our familiar tools are all available. And if compiling from source is not to your taste it is increasingly common for open source software projects to produce binaries for Mac OS X alongside binaries for other flavours of Unix.

And therefore…

Some of these reasons may sound trite but for most people their computer is only a tool to do a job. Using a desktop environment is not something done for its own sake. It is done in order to achieve a specific task. The better that desktop environment suits the user, the more efficiently the end task is achieved. Most users do customize their desktop to some extent so choosing the right desktop environment is important. For me Mac OS X offers the holy grail: the power of Unix with an elegant, intuitive, rock solid desktop environment. And when I choose to use an open source application like Firefox, my browser of choice, it runs just fine on my platform of choice. That really is the best of both worlds.

Further reading

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