incoherence.net

It’s been an Apple-tastic year of hardware for me, as I added a good amount of Job-sean computing power:

• Starting work at LOLapps, I asked for a behemoth of a laptop, the 17″ Macbook Pro. It turns out web development work is well-suited for the mac.
• I wanted a home media server; the Mac Mini made sense given its sexy form factor and reasonable price.
• The iPhone 3GS was a natural upgrade from the OG iPhone.
• And I just got another Macbook Pro for personal use.

Am I just another inductee into the Apple cult?

As I sit here trying vainly to justify my purchases, there have been a few factors that allowed Apple to hawk their wares successfully past my rigorous research regimen ⁽¹⁾ and fatten their own coffers. Starting with,

Domain-specific devices are useful and chic

I guess I’m harkening back to my college days here, but it used to be that one desktop PC had enough functionality to act as the all-in-one device. I built one for games, schoolwork, web, media; then again, I was stuck in a refitted living room most of the time, with a well-worn groove in my chair to prove it.

Nowadays, it’s back to device specialization: smartphones for web browsing on the go, eReaders for bedtime reading, laptops for typing on the couch, desktops for heavy computational lifting, media servers for multimedia consumption. Apple has its hands in most of these areas, and it helps that

Apple builds great hardware

I’m looking at my Macbook: great casing, giant smooth trackpad, bright LED-lit screen. The biggest hurdle for me was getting over paying the Steve Jobs premium, but it wasn’t till working with a MBP at work that I saw the value in having great build quality and solid hardware. They’ve made some progress in reducing the base cost of ownership on their products as well, what with the cheap $100 iPhones and $600 Mac Mini’s, and people eat up the sub-$200 iPods anyway. That said,

Mac software is good enough

I must be getting old, but I’m just not motivated to sit down for long hours in the night downloading and tweaking software to my exact preference for aesthetic or efficiency. I used to be a lot more judicious about which programs I used –

• Dock emulators in Windows,
• playing around with TweakXP,
• skinning Samurize (a customizable system info. overlay) and foobar2000,
• finding and installing the 30 Firefox plugins to get the UI exactly right

While the experience has been valuable, the amount of time spent and efficiencies improved rapidly diminished.

Conversely, software on the Mac and iPhone are usually good enough to get the job done, though usually missing enough options for the hardcore tweaker and tend to cost money to boot. I must be getting good karma for handing a few bucks to my fellow software developers, and more to that,

Macs are well-suited for web development

The web is platform agnostic. Coming from a background of C++ with Microsoft’s Visual Studio, this is a welcome change, with the simplest of tools being just a text editor and a browser. Since I work on the user interface side of things, it turns out that most of the tools are available for both Windows and Macs as well; the one sore point is that the most popular browser in the world is completely unavailable. We had people switch to Macs at work due to their crappy experiences with constantly-running anti-virus programs and rampant putty windows, plus

Apple makes a great user interface

There’s the consistent look across apps, the spiffy animations, the neat typography, and the minimalistic graphics. A good-looking, well-functioning interface is difficult to build, and I think both Microsoft and Apple spend a lot of effort getting it right (MS usually doesn’t get enough credit). People are starting to realize that as users, they do and should care about their interface with a product; it’s what enabled mint.com to succeed and make a good chunk of change, after all.

Of course it’s not all roses and long walks on the beach. Apple’s insistence on using its own ports necessitates buying expensive adapters and otherwise locks me into their systems; buying expensive proprietary cables have always been annoying; Macs still can’t play most games; in-depth customization seems to be a dirty word.

I still have my workhorse PC sitting next to the desk, cranking out polygons and computational flops. Having just installed Windows 7, it’s evident that Microsoft has made plenty of progress in its software as well, and, well, the hardware is as expensive as I’m willing to pay while being more cost-effective. This is probably the one area of specialty where a Windows-running PC still makes sense for me, and I’m sure if I wanted to I could remake this thing into another awesome all-in-one system.

Easier just to boot up NBA 2k10, though.

1. Space reserved for indignant snot and a sarcastic “Ha!” (↩)