// April 4th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
My affection for the Mac lasted about two weeks. But slowly the little things started to add up to big headaches and productivity drains. Last week I bought a new PC and switched back to Windows.
While I didn’t have as many complaints as this guy, I experienced many of the same frustrations.
Notably:
- It’s sloooowwww compared to my PC. The Mini is a 1.42 G4 with 1GB RAM. My Windows PC was a 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB RAM (XP Pro)
- iPhoto was maddening. It took me MUCH longer to update our family photo website, even after I learned how to use it.
- Finder, while light years faster than Windows Search, had a frustrating UI and had a knack for finding everything that matched except the particular file I was looking for.
- I use keyboard shortcuts excessively, and the Mac either didn’t support them consistently across applications, or not at all. Cut and Paste didn’t mean the same thing app to app, and that was frustrating.
- Quicken for Mac was a HUGE disappointment. It didn’t work anything like the Windows version and once I got the “Unable to open file” error and had to rebuild a month worth of data (even though I told it to backup after every close, and it appeared to be doing so, the most recent backup file inexplicably only had data through the end of the previous month). This was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back in making me wanting to go back to Windows. I’ve used Quicken on Windows for 6 years and in that time never experienced the frustrations I had in 3 weeks on the Mac.
- There’s no beating Ultra-Edit as a text editor, and it’s a Windows-only thing.
- I tried .Mac as a backup tool but it’s slow and cost-prohibitive compared to Handy Backup and mirroring to a work or dedicated ISP server (an option most people don’t have, but I do and it works better for me). I tried rsync-ing but never could get it to copy all the files out.
- Printer configuration was more of a pain than I figured it would be on a Mac.
There are a few other issues, as well as a number of things I did like (Fast User Switching, the built-in Unix utilities), but on balance Windows is faster, and I’m faster on my PC than on this little Mini.
So soon my little Mini will find itself on the eBay auction block. Maybe I can recoup a little of the cost.
I think much like there are Type-A and Type-B folks in this world, I think there are Windows people and Mac people. Some can make the switch more easily than others. Unlike some, I didn’t see it as a religious conversion. I hoped to actually gain some productivity and spend less time worrying about Windows security issues. Switching achieved only one of those, and unfortunately the one I was already expert in managing.
