Stress relief

As much as I thought I was going to die from the stress I caused myself in fretting over what Mac to buy and when, it was all worth it. I'm sure that normal people who don't get caught in these deep decision tree funks that I do over things as common as picking what to wear today will have an even better experience.

The Mac basically gets rid of all the BS that you have to deal with when using Windows, Linux or anything else I've seen and lets you get on with using the computer rather than fighting it or fixing it just to begin work. As you do something, you find that along the path of your workflow, the Apple engineers have given thought to most everything, whereas in Windows, it feels like there's only things along the way that they were forced to place there, and even then it's a big ugly sign or fork in the road reluctantly placed there that you always have to deal with.

Now before you go and say "where have you been since 1984?", I will tell you that I have been paying attention as my early posts talk about. Although the early Mac OS was very user friendly, the problem was the underlying architecture, and by 1994, I was accustomed to a fully multi-threaded, preemptive, multi-tasking operating system, and the Mac OS didn't have this until OS X. OS/2 had this in 1992, Windows had this with NT in 1993 or 1994, and only partially with Win95/98/ME starting in 1995. OS X was a nice leap ahead for the Mac OS architecture because of its NextStep origins, but the polish on the Mac interface part took some time, and some parts are still maturing. That's part of what took me a while to jump on board.

Now, with OS X since 10.2, you have a system that really lets the user become a partner with the computer rather than an adversary. This allows you to really experience what can be achieved with computers rather than fighting with the computer most of the time and calling that productivity. Your sense of accomplishment comes from things like getting Mail to announce e-mail arrival from your friends rather than from managing to finally wrangling the network settings to get your e-mail in the first place.

The only things that are not as nice as I would like are typically things that will likely get sorted out soon enough and aren't major issues. As lovely as Safari is, it is still maturing, so it has rough places like having no print options for header and footer info. Althought there are many keyboard shortcuts, there are still many places that need them. This is somethings Apple could easily fix. Microsoft tends to have more keyboard access, but Apple tends to have more intuitive keyboard access where they do have it. I still have to re-learn some things like cursor movement and keyboard editing that are different.

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