Everyone seems to be looking at buying a Mac lately. Well either that or they hate em'. Even Allen Bauer picked one up. He walked into my office about a month ago with a big grin on his face and said "I did it!"
Like many of you I'm tech support for my entire family, friends, extended friends, friends of family and friends of friends. Recently many of them have been upgrading their computers. My old hand-me-downs are starting to get pretty darn old I guess. My dad, for example, just bought the low end iMac. He went back and forth between Dell and Mac more times than I can count but once his best friend showed him his iMac my dad was almost sold. I say almost because it still took a few months, many trips to the Apple store and lots of reading before he made the plunge. Now he's up late at night video chatting with friends on the other side of the globe and his only regret is that he didn't buy it sooner.
One of my Dad's biggest problems was moving to the Mac is the lack of Quicken. Sure there is a Quicken-like piece of software sold called Quicken, but it leaves much to be desired. Even QuickBooks isn't as good as the Windows version. I've been using QuickBooks and iBank for a while now and they work but they arn't that good. I think the reason there isn't better personal finance software out there (even for Windows) is because nobody does it. They all do it online (which really isn't personal finance in most cases) or they just don't balance their checkbook. Makes me wonder.
Oh, and to answer Allen's burning question as to why Macs are so entrenched in school; they aren't. In the graphics professions the reason they have standardized on the Mac platform is because the fonts are completely different on Windows and Mac and the Mac works better, and in some cases they are just used to the Mac. I realized this when the Missus did work at home on our Windows version of Illustrator and brought it to her Mac at work and had to change out each font and adjust the location for it to look right. Mac renders the display to look as it will print. Windows renders the display as it will look on the monitor. Make a long story short, they look different.
I personally like Mac at home because I work all day with Windows and when I use a computer on my personal time I don't want it to be work. Also the color profiling is awesome on the Mac and I really like the hardware.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Buying a Mac
2 comments:
Even though there are similar apps out there for the Mac, it does pains me a bit that programs such as Quicken or MYOB just don't match up to their PC equivalents. I switched over to the Mac a year ago and have not looked back. I imagined that I would be spending 70% of the time using Boot Camp/Parallels to do Windows stuff and the 30% doing Mac stuff. What I found is that more and more of my computer time is spent on the Mac side of things.
One of the things that keep me planted in the PC world is Delphi. What I would really like to see is that CodeGear look into producing a Delphi for Mac OS X. I know you guys got burnt with the whole Kylix thing. I think the difference here is that Mac OS X since going Intel has really lifted its marketshare is becoming a lot more mainstream on the desktop for average consumers than linux ever did.
The market is ripe. Even though RAD Studio is a great IDE, it's always going to be an uphill battle with MS Visual Studio entrenched in the Window sphere. The Mac development environment is pretty limited and something like Delphi will really set it on fire.
With more CG guys being exposed to Macs, you guys must be able to see the potential there.
I get excited everytime I see a CodeGear employee buy or talk Mac... I can only hope it leads to the inetivitble... a version of Delphi for Mac!! Seems to be a rapidly expanding market that Ii would like to exploit. I've been pretty well poised using Delphi for the past decade hope the next is the same! :)
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