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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: How it feels after 8 months of Mac usage
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I think its time to blog about my overall feelings in working with a Mac after 8 months of usage. One thing that i want to mention has nothing to do with the switch itself, its more about convenience. I would never go back buying a desktop computer, no matter if its a Mac Pro or a PC. I really love having all the things with me, no matter where i am. Forgotten the times where i have to sync different computers. The future is called notebook, no matter what.
The first 2 months were quite disgusting because of some hardware failures but the support was ok so that i wasnt too upset. Ok, i had to buy a Mac Mini because noone was able to give me some replacement notebook for the time mine was under repair, but anyway, the mac mini is a nice device and is serving a good service at the moment. But how is the hardware doing after 8 months? Fine! Keyboards keys are still in a good shape and all the mechanical stuff works as expected.
Working experience is still the no1 argument with a mac. It still feels nice to operate on MacOS X. I was pretty fast into the whole OSX thing, which is no problem with a solid linux background. The operating system is definitely years ahaed of windows. But not everything is greener in the garden of MacOS X. I identified two areas of programs where all available mac software just sucks.
1) order management / ERP
I am using a very small ERP system (from SAGE) for my little company on windows. I am using it for some years now. It costs about 200 EUROs and offers really a lot of features. If you look whats available on Mac, you instantly get the impression of highly overpriced and underfeatured software. Most of them relying on fu*/$=ing Filemaker and most of them produced for one man design companies.
2) homebanking
There are 2 or 3 relevant homebanking software on Mac and none of them impressed me anyhow except from the price but i an a negative way. On Windows you get useful software like star-money with full smartcard reader support and quite useful features for 39 EUROs. On a mac you pay a lot more while getting less.
All in all, one gets the impression that a mac is a cool platform, as long as you dont want to use business style applications. Luckily its easy to put them on a virtual win installation on Parallels or VMWare Fusion.
So what i would buy if i had to buy a new notebook tomorrow? The answer is clear. The latest and greated Macbook Pro. This week i am ordering a UMTS express card, i am excited about that too. I was tired of using a mobile umts phone and go via bluetooth because no VPN software works with this combination. All in all its anyway more convenient to constantly have a card in there where you only need to hit the connect button in OS X.
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