I am a Mac but OS X was not my idea

I just got my third Mac in the last two years. Now, I am not an Apple fanboy – I don’t even own an iPhone or an iPad – but I absolutely love my Mac. All of my Macs have been through work, but had my latest job not given me a Mac, I would have been forced to buy one – and yes they are quite expensive.

My affair with Macs started when I joined Blist and they gave me an option of a Mac/Windows/Linux machine. I ended up choosing a Mac just because it wasn’t something I had tried before. It did take a while to transition – the philosophy is quite different from Windows – and there are still some things that I don’t like, such as missing Home/End keys, Cmd-Tab not showing all open windows etc. But now, I am addicted!  I had withdrawal symptoms for the two weeks I had to spend without one after my last job. I wished that they had let me keep my laptop instead of the 30in monitor that I got instead.

Nowadays, I see a lot more Macs on the bus or in flights, and there is always someone or the other claiming they bought a Mac on Facebook. So the measly 5% market share that Macs have does not do justice to the popularity of Macs.  Macs have always been popular with artists, writers, journalists and the kind, but recently they have started to gain popularity amongst geeks.  This is the third company that I am working at where all developers have a Mac. And for good reason, Macs give you the best of both the Windows and Linux world. Instead of carrying around a Windows laptop for checking mail and Linux desktop for writing code, you can have a Mac on which you can do both – check mail and write code – now that’s what I call genius!

I believe OS X has been primary driver behind getting these tech companies to use Macs. OS X did what the Linux community had been trying for years and hadn’t really succeeded at – building a GUI that your grandma can use on a Unix based platform.  Now, I can have all my favorite tools – vi, zsh, grep, awk, perl etc and still get a great UI. Heck, this blogpost is written in vi (well Vim actually, but whatever). Moreover everything is pre-installed – anyone who has tried to use terminal utilities in Windows through Cygwin or otherwise knows what a nightmare they can be.

The one big drawback I see for Macs, and the reason I think they are not mainstream, is the lack of business productivity tools. There is no Outlook on the Mac! Microsoft Entourage is just a poor man’s substitute. In fact Apple Mail has much better integration with Exchange than Microsoft’s own client. And Office for the Mac is nowhere close to that on Windows. Of course, there are multiple other alternatives, such as iWork or OpenOffice, but none of those are as mature as the products for the Windows platform.

But, hey I am not a banker or a sales & marketing guy – so a Mac works great for me. I only wish they were a bit cheaper.