Six months after my switch [to Mac], an update

David Alison's Blog ^ | 08/16/2008 | David Alison

[Swordmaker]

I'm now just past the six month mark since tentatively purchasing my first Mac and beginning to switch away from Windows. At the time I bought my MacBook I had a number of machines in the house, all running either Windows or Ubuntu. What I've tried to do on this blog is provide a kind of running commentary on switching, hitting on some of the challenges I've encountered, the native Mac applications I've found and the general feelings I've had about making the switch.

What I find interesting after 6 months is the impact buying that little MacBook had not only on the way I handle my personal computing but to a large degree the influence it has had on the way I do my development work. You see after I bought the MacBook I found myself doing more and more with it. I had a Windows XP development / gaming rig parked directly in front of me but I was constantly sliding my hands over to the MacBook.

My entire development platform—at the time Visual Studio—was completely set up and I had my after-market libraries installed and was using it to build my next online service business. Even with all of my development experience being Windows based I constantly found myself pushing away from my XP system and over to the MacBook. This was not helping my productivity, at least on the development front.

I rationalized that if I bought a Mac Pro that I could install VMware Fusion on it and use that as my primary development platform. I was obviously hooked on OS X and the idea of having a machine with 8 cores and 12GB of RAM running it was pretty cool. I bought the Mac Pro, placed it in the position of being my primary workstation (pushing the Windows XP machine off to the side) and I was off and running.

I was quickly able to get the Mac Pro up and running with Windows XP and my development environment in a VMware Fusion instance. With a couple of minor exceptions it worked great, providing me with everything I needed to build my web based solutions just as I had been on my native Windows XP machine.

Not long after all this I started to look at Ruby on Rails as an option for development, something that would serve as a replacement for my Visual Studio environment. Why? Much like with Windows itself, I had been doing the same kind of development for a very long time. Given the recent sale of my last company I have the luxury of defining fully the tools I could use to build my next generation of products and I wanted to see if there was an easier way to build Web 2.0-like web applications.

Though it took me a month of getting up to speed on Ruby on Rails I found it to be a fantastic platform for building what I needed to create. With a very English-like language, an extensive library of free plugins, nice Ajax support built in and the ability to get a basic application framework up and running in a matter of hours, RoR was exactly what I was looking for. In two short months I've made far more progress than I did in the 4+ months I spent building my solution in VS .NET / C#.

On top of all that, it turns out most of the core Ruby on Rails guys are Mac people too. OS X already comes with RoR and the fact that I could use TextMate, easily one of the best programming editors I have ever experienced, was a huge plus.

I suddenly found myself using my Macs exclusively. I wasn't even firing up the Windows XP instance because I only needed it for Visual Studio. The Windows XP gaming rig was powered down and resting in the corner, serving mostly as a device to crack my knee on if I swiveled my chair too quickly. Fortunately I was able to find a buyer for it, leaving me without any native Windows hardware (well, my wife and son are still using XP).

Selling the XP rig gave me the money to purchase a MacBook Pro, giving the MacBook to my youngest daughter. She couldn't be happier ditching the Dell she had for it and is constantly using the machine. Photo Booth alone has provided her with endless amounts of fun and she's using the iSight camera to do video chats with her cousin in California.

Then, suddenly, the iPhone became part of our digital lives. When Sprint dropped the ball and our service failed miserably I bit the bullet and bought my wife and I both a couple of iPhones. It's been a fantastic device and my phone reception (contrary to many reports I've read) has been excellent. The best part of getting the iPhone though was watching my non-technical wife not only use it but embrace it completely. Between pulling down her e-mail and doing some web browsing while out shopping, I was shocked by how quickly she took to it. This from a woman that had up to this point in time never sent a single text message. She sends text messages regularly now with our daughters.

She now finally wants a Mac of her own and is going to get one for her birthday next month. I'll be writing about how she adapts to using it as well. Now that summer is winding down and our extended vacations are coming to an end I'll have a little more time to commit to blogging.

[Cold Heat]

My three work flawlessly, and have since day one. I do a lot of processing on them and they do it all.

Now I have much better, and more important things to do and I won't waste your time because it's pointless, but what I said will become evident, and every attempt I ever made to use AMD's 64 bit crap has failed. I junked another machine last week. What a shame, but the quad I bought took it, and another's place.

Whatever................reality sucks sometimes.

[merp]

Exactly how high are you right now? Nothing you are typing makes any coherent sense.

If you don’t think that OSX can perform complex tasks, you’re sadly mistaken. Here’s a quick output from the “top” command on this G5:

Processes: 102 total, 6 running, 96 sleeping... 380 threads
Load Avg: 0.55, 0.27, 0.24 CPU usage: 13.60% user, 16.18% sys, 70.22% idle
SharedLibs: num = 1, resident = 128K code, 0 data, 0 linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 45592, resident = 1268M + 0 private, 586M shared.
PhysMem: 499M wired, 2037M active, 481M inactive, 3073M used, 3071M free.
VM: 26G + 374M 506656(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts

I have no fewer than 18 applications running, consisting of email, web, calendar, IM, iTunes, the Activity Monitor, a text editor, the system console log, a remote desktop session to my desktop at work over a VPN, the VideoLAN client, three PDF documents, the system dictionary, and the printer queue manager. Depending on mood and without closing anything, I’ll fire up Halo or World of Warcraft (both of which can run in a window easily on this machine), and have played both while running live software compiles and video post processing in the background, while listening to internet radio streaming through iTunes and burning a DVD, with zero system load artifacts. The system will in fact report 100% CPU utilization, but it simply doesn’t show up in the user interface. I have yet to experience this level of seamless multitasking on any version of Windows, including Vista.

Simply put, this is hands-down the best computer I have ever owned, and it will sadden me (albeit not for long) when it gets replaced at the next Pro desktop release, probably this winter. There is also the strong possibility that it will not get replaced at all, and I will continue to use it until major component failure, which, knowing Apple and IBM’s general build quality, will probably not happen for another five years. That will make a solid decade of no-muss-no-fuss computing for this one machine. Get that out of a PC, I dare you.

[Cold Heat]

Lordy!

Any decent box can run all that stuff you listed. That's not what I'm talking about. try running at least four video feeds with two on full screen and 4 F@H Folding operations, one one each core, and then add all that stuff you listed.

Now your talkin work.

Thank you velly much but I must cook dinner.

[antiRepublicrat]

Wow, got me beat on this iMac:

Processes: 92 total, 10 running, 3 stuck, 79 sleeping... 388 threads
Load Avg: 8.62, 8.47, 8.55 CPU usage: 63.37% user, 36.63% sys, 0.00% idle
SharedLibs: num = 8, resident = 55M code, 296K data, 3860K linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 15414, resident = 862M + 33M private, 297M shared.
PhysMem: 962M wired, 1395M active, 688M inactive, 3051M used, 21M free.
VM: 13G + 374M 273597(4723) pageins, 41556(103) pageouts

It’s running pretty well right now. That includes a video encode in the background, XP in VMWare and Folding@Home.

[merp]

Apparently you don’t know what you’re talking about, since F@H runs at the lowest process priority available, only running when there’s nothing else for the machine to do. The fact that you’ve got four of them running is a red herring; they don’t contribute to system overhead in any appreciable fashion.

Furthermore, this dual 2GHz G5 can do all that just fine. In fact, I’ve managed six simultaneous video streams composited into a single stream out to disk. And this is on a five-year-old system.

[merp]

Mine’s mostly idle right now. I’m not doing anything particularly CPU intensive. Most of what the machine’s doing is waiting on input. I wonder about the “3 stuck” in your listing; the Windows XP VM, perhaps :)

[Cold Heat]

since F@H runs at the lowest process priority available

It's totally adjustable my little argumentative friend, and that has nothing to do with work load and multiple apps. I run mine until they the roar of the cooling fan and the heat coming up between my legs makes me nervous. Then I pull up the CPU monitor and take a look see. I have been known to shutdown a app if I think I'm close to letting the smoke out. But what I've found is that since switching to VISTA that I don't even have to do that. It's a better manager than XP, and it rips. My resource hog, Ameritrade, has a list of stocks a mile long that it constantly calculates and graphs for my information, and I get no slowdown or crashes. Not any more!

I understand Apple is now allowing a version of XP for those who require it, but they will never have VISTA and I will never have Apple, so there we go. All these attacks on Vista's OS are and have been nothing but noise from the peanut gallery.

[Spktyr]

Wow, you really are behind. Vista has been available on Macs via Boot Camp for over a year (built into all 10.4 and 10.5 Macs), and via Parallels and VMware Fusion for only a little less time.

ANY operating systems PeeCs can run, an Intel Mac can run. By the way, one of your prior very confused and hard to read posts seemed to imply that Macs used AMD processors. They don’t, thank god.

[antiRepublicrat]

Look at mine. F@H is automatically multi-core on a Mac. That includes a high-bitrate mp4 video playing too.

[abigkahuna]

iMovie06 I understand is far superior than the new iMovie08. I don;t have the latest iMovie to compare, but I use editing in iMovie06 quite frequently. Added with third party Slick movie editing program I can turn out some pretty cool things.

2006 macbook 2Ghz Intel Core Duo
1GB 667 MHZ DDR2 SDRAM

My first computer after using webtv. A 50 y.o. man who took to the apple like a duck to water. Its simple to use and so far, no problems.

[abigkahuna]

In fact, I'll go so far as to say that with a Mac you treat it like an appliance, and use it to email, read FR and play games. You end up never learning about the innards of the hardware or the OS, because you don't need to.

Again this sums up how the typical Apple user I meet are like. Sure there are exceptions but the majority are like this.

And thats why I purchased a macbook. I do not have time to learn a bunch of esoteric rigamarole. I want to turn on the machine and have it do what i want it to do. Its as simple as that.

Being a bit older, I was not brought up with video games, text messages, or even computers... Had to teach myself how to turn it on.. Push a button and see what happens...

Apple's macbook let me learn easily how to do what I wanted to do because the tools were logical. The things I needed to do in my business wee "creative" things, such as designing banners, signs, movies, sound, and other visual things... It worked the first time and every time thereafter.

You can use whatever HP/Dell/Whatever you want. For this old man, the Apple works.

PC folks here want to get into it and call me a liberal, dullard, and host of other insults for using a tool that I find gets the job done... Then fine--Do it... It will help with your superior feelings about yourself--meanwhile, I got work to do...

[Cold Heat]

No, I was not implying that. I mentioned AMD as a 64 bit disaster.

I did not know about the boot camp workaround. Most mac heads won't touch a windows product if they can help it. I'd like to see it run it. But I doubt that will happen.

Yeah, I'm all friggin confused about where to get the best band for my buck. I also despise OEM traps.

Add the two major personality faults, and I make this terrible error in judgment and love PC's.

I guess I'm a glutton for punishment.

[antiRepublicrat]

The first one Jobs admitted they bit off too much at one time. They comped everyone involved, even extended free trials.

The second one, nobody’s perfect. Even though Apple has the highest customer satisfaction rating among OEMs, some bad instances will still happen. The effort is in keeping those incidents to a minimum.

[antiRepublicrat]

VISTA is the first iteration of a much more complex OS that can do the raft of complex tasks that are the future

What are those? One cool thing I can think of that Apple is nowhere near implementing is workflows (completely different from the task scripting in OS X workflows), but that's for any Windows OS with the latest .NET.

[Spktyr]

Oh yeah, the fastest Vista laptop you can get... is a MacBook Pro.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/136649-3/in_pictures_the_most_notable_notebooks_of_2007.html

Mostly because Apple writes better Windows drivers than even Microsoft can.

[Mr. Jeeves]

For those who do, Mac will fit the bill for a period of time, but VISTA is the first iteration of a much more complex OS that can do the raft of complex tasks that are the future.

Just the opposite - Vista is the last gasp of Win32, crippled by its need for backward compatibility with most of the junk hardware and software in the known universe. It's the first iteration of a new and attractive GUI, but that's about it.

With all the computer science talent Microsoft has on staff, I expect them to come out with an operating system such as you describe in the near future, but they are going to have to bite the bullet, make the hard decision Apple did with OS/X, break backward compatibility, and start from scratch to get there. They are probably well into that process already, in secret.

[antiRepublicrat]

Because Win32 is an architectural mess, with almost zero consistency, so MS tried to fix this with MDI, .NET, Forms, all of which leave out functionality in some form or another that requires the programmer to go back down to Win32 to get back.

Hallelujah I can attest to that. I don't know how many times I've had to import Win32 libraries because .NET can't do it natively (i.e., .NET doesn't already have a wrapper for that Win32 functionality). Still I have to admit I like .NET, especially c#, but at those rare instances I get some time to work on OS X programming Objective C and the Cocoa API are drawing me over.

[gost2]

Who gives a flying flip?

There’s only one reason to buy a windoz machine. Because Gates has illegally driven thousands of software companies out of biz ... there’s more software for PCs out there. But then a Mac will run all of it better.

[Yossarian]

I understand Apple is now allowing a version of XP for those who require it, but they will never have VISTA and I will never have Apple, so there we go. All these attacks on Vista's OS are and have been nothing but noise from the peanut gallery.

You're just plain stupid. I've had the piece of crap known as "Vista" installed on my MacBookPro for over a year now. It triple-boots, either in virtual machines or a real-live hard boot, Vista (used for software and website testing only), Ubuntu 8, and of course Mac OS 10.5 Leopard.

As a software and hardware developer, with millions of dollars worth of software shipped (well, my employer overpriced my stuff...) I can say that you have no idea what you're talking about.