People that know me know I’ve long been a Mac user, in the fashion of the Older Generation, where you aren’t just a user but an advocate. Living through the slim times, when Apple was always on the verge of going out of business and using a Mac was more of a peculiar affectation than any kind of practical option, you had to have a bit of the fanatic in you.
These days, Apple’s got a great thing going. They have software and hardware that’s a joy to use, and, as a shareholder, they keep turning out record quarterly results, even with “these troubled economic times”. Folks feel comfortable jumping onboard, which always leads to those mixed feelings in old-schoolers of all sorts. Glad to see the platform is doing so well, but worried that these new folks are going to somehow wreck the place, and whether they have the commitment to stick with it through the hard times. Yes, the second part is stupid.
So, being this kind of Mac user made it feel little odd for me to go into IT in an entirely Windows environment. No way was I going to turn the job down, but I knew that there was going to be a price to pay in terms of enjoying using computers. And so there was. 8 years on, and Windows XP has aged very poorly. I never liked it much back in the day, it felt like a hastily applied coat of paint thrown on in an effort to suppress the potential of Mac OS X (XP? Really?), released months earlier in 2001. XP still isn’t much to work with, and hasn’t aged very well.
I’ve barely touched Vista, so I won’t bother to mention it. However, we’ve just gotten some Windows 7 disks at work, and eager to try anything that would get something better to work with than XP in my hands, I installed it on a test PC, and my new MacBook.
I love it. Caveats of course, I still wouldn’t use it over my Mac, and will probably only really boot it for games and the occasional curious piece of software or work business, and it still has some vestiges of that patronizing voice of Windows, always implying that it’s not really sure you know what you’re doing, and Aero is a hideous transparency-fest. But I’m quite impressed, for Windows. I’m really looking forward to using it at work.
The funny thing is, it feels more like a Mac. That’s probably what makes it work for me. There’s a lot more attention to the way things work together, and to the small details. I could always feel all the seams in Windows where you could tell one development team left off and the next began, like navigating the divisions of a schizophrenic mind, but 7 starts to feel like an integrated whole. This has always been the advantage (and occasional hindrance) of Apple, that all of their products have to go through Steve Jobs to get out the door, giving their products a hint of cohesion and authorship, the stamp of a person rather than the result of a Gantt chart. I don’t know if somebody at Microsoft stepped up and took this role, but whatever it is, I like where they’re going.
OS X has run nearly unopposed in terms of overall usability since its debut in 2001, and I’m glad to see that Microsoft has finally learned something from it, and hopefully Apple answer in kind with whatever comes after Snow Leopard. As with the flowering of the mobile world, with so much good stuff coming out, it’s an exciting time to be a geek.
