[A] King of New Media

“What do you think of your Mac?”

This is a question I often get, which means it’s worth at least a half thought out post here.

First a brief background if you don’t know me very well. My parent’s bought the family computer in 1993, I was a Junior in High School. The next day we were on Gateway 2000 tech support for eight hours to fix what took me less than a day to break. We ultimately had to fdsk it and start from scratch. I was thrilled. I now had the tools I needed to destroy and bring back from the dead, the computer. Which I didn’t hesitate to do many times going forward.

Fast forward to my second year of college at DeVry where I was introduced to this crazy thing called Linux. I had heard about it, but once I had a demonstration, I knew I needed it. And once I discovered I could install an entire operating system with a 3.5″ boot up disk and the internet, I was in love. I was now a Debian user.

But alas I was a frustrated Debian user. I spent way too much time to keep this thing running and ran into trouble that other’s seemed to avoid somehow. So when Ubuntu “Linux for Human Beings” arrived on the scene, I couldn’t have been happier. Things that caused great frustration worked like I felt they should.

However, now the problem was that I couldn’t do a lot of things I wanted to. We had come a LONG LONG way, but there was still some room. Connecting to my iPod was a constant frustration, hardware incompatibility, etc. As a PHP developer and having all servers running Linux, I love having BASH locally so everything was seamless.

Now comes the Mac. It’s based on BSD, another Unix POSIX operating system which means it works just like Linux, BASH and all. And 600% improvement of it ‘just working’. Obviously there are no hardware problems on the Mac, obviously it connects to my iPod quite well, and everything else I want to do, it works like a champ. Not only that, it has video editing software that comes with it, and I never found any video editing software that I could get operational on Linux. Not to mention the screen on the Mac is BEAUTIFUL (I’m sporting the matte), the weight of the 17″ is the lightest computer I’ve ever had to haul around (and that is going back to my 10.4″ [largest screen available at the time] 486 DX4 75Mhz Gateway 2000 laptop in 1994 for $4000). And if that statement is not true in actuality, it feels like it. :)

All right, if I keep going from here it will be rambling so I’m stopping. But that’s my thoughts on my first year on the Mac.

Your thoughts?