Do I Miss My Mac?

Over the past week, I moved my Mac over to the table that my PC was on and moved the PC to my desk. The reason? No, not because I was tired of the Mac, and, no, not because the Mac was broken. I had loaded so many files on my hard drive that it was almost full - and if I continued using the Mac as my main machine, I knew that I would never delete the useless files.

So I started using the PC last Friday. It was "custom made" for the previous owner, who I bought it from three years ago. It has a QDI Explorer II AT logic board, a 200 MHz Pentium (non-MMX) processor, 64 MB of RAM, a 1 MB video card, a 56K modem, a 10/100 ethernet card, a SoundBlaster 16 card, two 2.5 GB hard drives, and a 12x CD-ROM, all in a minitower case that looks just like almost every other 133-233 MHz PC clone ever made (three 5.25" bays in the front, followed by one floppy drive below and an empty spot, possibly for a Zip drive).

It's running Windows 2000, which is very stable, and I have never had it crash. Win2k also runs very quickly on this machine, despite the PC being five years old.

It is old, but it works surprisingly well for most things. Browsing the Internet is easily as fast as on my G4, if not faster. Word processing is the same speed, although I don't particularly like Microsoft Office 97 (or 2000/2002 for that matter) for Windows.

So what do I miss about the Mac? Mostly I miss the speed of the interface and the ability to browse folders via the dock.

Windows 2000 is pretty fast, but the design of the Windows interface (as many people know) is clunky and confusing, so it tends to take me just a little bit longer to find what I want. On my Mac, I know I can get to folders easily by clicking them in the dock or in the toolbar of a Finder window. I can't do that on this PC, which means I have to have icons all over my desktop for folders that contain things I want to access - or I have them in the Start menu, which takes slightly longer than the dock.

On my Mac, I can easily access the contents of a folder by control-clicking it in the dock. It's not possible with the taskbar; the nearest equivalent is the Start menu, which is a bit clumsier than the dock.

The Mac also has much better hardware/software integration. I can name at least ten parts in my PC that were made by completely different companies and were never specifically designed to work together. When NEC made the hard drives, they probably didn't specifically test it with my model of logic board. Since ATA is a standard, they probably tested it with a few models from popular manufacturers and said that it is compatible with all ATA controllers. This, of course, means that it's compatible with all of them except the one you happen to be using (although since it was preconfigured when I got it, I didn't have to worry about it).

When you install a new device in a PC, sometimes Windows will recognize it and install all the necessary drivers. But the majority of times Windows won't even know that you installed something, and you will be faced with the tedious task of trying to tell Windows that the files are in the A: drive, only to have it look for your Windows CD in the E: drive. The Mac is nice and easy - all you do is install the drivers from your CD by running the installer, attach the device, and continue working.

In terms of hardware/software integration, the PC is still way behind. But in terms of operating systems, Windows is catching up to the Mac OS in terms of ease of use and features. Windows NT 4, 2000, and XP almost never crash. Things have been simplified, and the OS supports a huge number of devices, but installing drivers manually is still a pain.

Of course this PC looks nowhere near as nice as my Mac, and the keyboard isn't as good as the Apple Pro Keyboard. One thing Apple has that PC manufacturers rarely do are amazingly designed cases.

While I do enjoy using my PC, I enjoy using my Mac more.