Stop the presses. Hell has frozen over. I’ve bought a Mac.
The day that no one ever saw coming has arrived. Most people who know me know that I have a personal vendetta against Apple because of things like locking down their OS and the smugness of their customers. I’m pretty shocked myself that I bought a Mac but let me explain why.
Ever since I started working at the UCI Computer Store, I have been forced to use a Macintosh because we use three iMacs to log whatever we sell. This made me realize that the Computer Store was not the only company that I might work for that will use OS X. To stay competitive in the technology world, it’s good to learn a lot of operating systems and seeing as OS X is the second most used operating system in the world, I though it’d take this time to buy a Mac. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to abandon Windows, as most people thought I was going to do after buying my Mac. Windows is what I grew up with and I still love it. Windows is like my adoptive mother that I will always love, even if she did spawn Vista. I forgive her.
So far, I like my Mac. I don’t love it won’t ditch PC and Windows forever but I do enjoy it very much. There are things that bother me about the Macbook that I got like the fact that it only has two USB ports, how the viewing angles on the screen are abhorrent, and how there’s not freakin’ right click even though there’s obviously function for it. I know you have to Ctrl click to get to the right click function but how hard would it be to put in a second physical button? If you want to retain the single button look, then make it a rocker, like PC manufacturers have been doing for years. Another thing that bugs me about the Mac is that you can’t full screen some programs. Sometimes when yo uhit the little green plus sign, it just resizes the window some what randomly. I asked my co-workers about this and they scoffed and said, “It only resizes the window to how much you need it to be. It’s hilarious how Windows users freak out when they can’t full screen.” Why should the computer decide how much of the screen i want a window to take up? I want to decide how much screen i want taken up. Is that so crazy? But the one thing that really bugs me is the build quality of the Macbook. For a company that prides itself on quality, the Macbook just feels flimsy and doesn’t fit together just right. I mean it’s not horrible but there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement. The keyboard is “squishy” and makes me make lots of errors while typing unlike my Dell’s hard-as-rock keyboard and the sides of the case are flimsy.
One interesting thing that I found out about the Macbook is that the left two screws on the side of the Macbook are purely cosmetic. They do not grab onto anything and if you push in on it with a bit of force, you will see the panel move inward. Next time you’re at an Apple store, try it out and compare how solid the right side feels compared to the left. I am not joking. The myth behind the “Squishy Macbook” is that Steve Jobs looked at the preproduction Macbooks and noticed that there were no screws on the left but there were on the right and told th team to put two screws on the left so that things were symmetrical. This speaks to how Apple is run and what they value the most. Apple design has always been impeccable but at what cost?
Still, with all of these flaws, I can’t help but like the Macbook. I don’t love it. But I do enjoy it and with that, I’m going to finish drinking my Kool-Aid.