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Christmas saw a new addition to our family in the form of Bob III - who, despite the name, is apparently female like all other Macs. Bob the First was Whitney's old laptop, which was followed by Bob Reborn when the hard drive eventually gave out and had to be sent off to Apple to be replaced, so this is the latest in their lineage. (Curiously, my old laptop was also called Bob because I got it from my dad and the hard drive had that volume label. You know you're meant for each other when you own laptops with matching names.)
Whitney is a Mac and I'm a PC. This is something that's been known ever since we met each other, and causes its own difficulties. Not between us, most of the time - just that it's rather difficult to get our computers to talk to each other, because both of them think that they're too good for the other. More specifically I'd guess that it's because Windows is just awful at networking to anything that isn't itself, but moving on... I have never been a fan of OS X, because of its unfamiliar layout, I don't see the point of the Dock, and I'm a firm believer that making right-click more inconvenient to get to and renaming it isn't the same as simplifying it away.
But this thing is very nice. First of all, you ought to see the size of the thing - it's a 24-inch monitor with the entire workings of the computer mounted behind it and is about the size of my two monitors combined. It stands in the corner of the desk area of the kitchen, looming over the chair but in an entirely nice and friendly way. When you turn it on for the first time, you get the smiling Mac logo and are guided very nicely through the setup. It then takes a photograph of you to use as its default user icon, which came as something of a surprise and made it look rather more self-aware than I'm comfortable with - even now I get the uneasy feeling that it's watching me whenever I'm in the room.
I know that Macs are regarded as one of the most expensive examples of style over substance the world has ever known (and the "expensive" part is right - do you have any idea how much its memory costs?), but it's got a lot of style. The backup utility exemplifies it. In Windows, you open a window called System Restore, click through a calendar and select a day you want to go back to. On the Mac, you start up the Time Machine, the desktop drops away, and you're suddenly flying through a starfield approaching a distant nebula. I was half-expecting the Star Wars fanfare to start up. Then you zoom through a front-to-back display of folder windows, look through the one that looks the most likely, select it and are returned back to Earth again with the restored folder. See what I mean?
Apple's image is largely based on gimmicks like this, but I haven't seen gimmicks done quite that well before. And it's true that the Mac operating system does get some more basic functional things right as well. Installing a program works just how it should in theory - drag an icon out to install a program, drag it to the bin to uninstall it. Everything is entirely self-contained (helped by the way that Mac applications are actually folders in disguise) and has no outside references to search through when anything goes wrong. Although dragging a disk to the bin means "eject" rather than "format disk" as I'd expect, but that's a separate issue.
And there's the fact that you get a remote control with it and can scroll through your music and films from the other side of the room through Front Row and its flamboyant zoom/flip/rotate menu. It's exactly what people in 1980 thought the computers of the future were going to be like, and while it doesn't add to the functionality, you have to admit that it looks good.
There is one last thing. It's rather clever, excruciatingly smug, and is a perfect demonstration of the reason that Windows and Mac users don't get on with each other. Do you know what the default icon is when you connect a Windows computer to the network?
Whitney is a Mac and I'm a PC. This is something that's been known ever since we met each other, and causes its own difficulties. Not between us, most of the time - just that it's rather difficult to get our computers to talk to each other, because both of them think that they're too good for the other. More specifically I'd guess that it's because Windows is just awful at networking to anything that isn't itself, but moving on... I have never been a fan of OS X, because of its unfamiliar layout, I don't see the point of the Dock, and I'm a firm believer that making right-click more inconvenient to get to and renaming it isn't the same as simplifying it away.
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I know that Macs are regarded as one of the most expensive examples of style over substance the world has ever known (and the "expensive" part is right - do you have any idea how much its memory costs?), but it's got a lot of style. The backup utility exemplifies it. In Windows, you open a window called System Restore, click through a calendar and select a day you want to go back to. On the Mac, you start up the Time Machine, the desktop drops away, and you're suddenly flying through a starfield approaching a distant nebula. I was half-expecting the Star Wars fanfare to start up. Then you zoom through a front-to-back display of folder windows, look through the one that looks the most likely, select it and are returned back to Earth again with the restored folder. See what I mean?
Apple's image is largely based on gimmicks like this, but I haven't seen gimmicks done quite that well before. And it's true that the Mac operating system does get some more basic functional things right as well. Installing a program works just how it should in theory - drag an icon out to install a program, drag it to the bin to uninstall it. Everything is entirely self-contained (helped by the way that Mac applications are actually folders in disguise) and has no outside references to search through when anything goes wrong. Although dragging a disk to the bin means "eject" rather than "format disk" as I'd expect, but that's a separate issue.
And there's the fact that you get a remote control with it and can scroll through your music and films from the other side of the room through Front Row and its flamboyant zoom/flip/rotate menu. It's exactly what people in 1980 thought the computers of the future were going to be like, and while it doesn't add to the functionality, you have to admit that it looks good.
There is one last thing. It's rather clever, excruciatingly smug, and is a perfect demonstration of the reason that Windows and Mac users don't get on with each other. Do you know what the default icon is when you connect a Windows computer to the network?
