Mac VS PC, my story.

Well folks, it has been a few months since I purchased my Mac Mini off of eBay and even though I have been doing a lot of travel, and a lot of things have been going on in my life, I still have had the opportunity to use this new computer, and I believe that I have finally come to a surprising decision to go back to using Windows. Here’s my story about how I love the Mac, and why I’m not sticking with it.

As most of you know, I’ve been a computer person for a long time and in that time, I always liked tinkering and trying to make things work better or play with things all in the realm of computers. After having yet another argument with my PC about video capture, I finally had enough and decided that I wanted to switch to Mac which is supposed to ease my life when it comes to multimedia. I didn’t want to tinker anymore.

The fact for me is, I don’t play a lot of games on my computer and I use it more for surfing the internet, music, and storing digital photos and video. All of which the Mac is known for being superior for. Also knowing that the OS works rather nicely and is pretty to look at is all very attractive. So, I invested about $400 in a used Mac Mini to see how it would work with my environment and whether or not it was worth the money to buy a brand new one.

Let’s start with the pros. For starters, it was easy to set up and I was online within 5 minutes. The GUI is very nice and I really enjoyed the animations and how well everything flows together. I had almost no crashes the entire time and the few I had were because I was using very weird shareware software so I’ll put the blame on bad programming, not on the Mac. The learning curve was quite small so I got used to using the interface quickly, and I gotta say, I love the fact I can shut the machine down with a 4 key combination. Pretty much every application I ever used for the PC I was able to find for the Mac in some format. It surprised me to see how many of my PC apps were available on the Mac. To me, it seemed like I was going to become a Mac person in no time flat.

Then, I learned about what truly is different about Mac’s compared to PC’s. One of the selling features of a Mac is that it makes everything very easy. It organizes your music and video and photos all for you and makes it very easy to find things. Yes, it did do all of that. The problem is, when you have files that are shared between a PC and a Mac, there can be MAJOR problems. Let’s start with the most common task I use my machine for, playing MP3’s.

I come from a world of Winamp. My entire MP3 experience before the Mac was purely with Winamp and I love Winamp. Even in Linux, I used a Winamp like player because I love the simplicity so much. I add the songs I want to play to my playlist, and play them. I double click a song and it plays in Winamp. All of that functionality is available in iTunes but iTunes insists that it wants to maintain a “library” of all of my music. I don’t want a library. I just want a player. When Tamara moved a bunch of files from one folder to another, none of the her music would play in iTunes so I had to reimport everything. Yes, Winamp would be the same thing, but to re-add about 20 songs in Winamp would take about 8 seconds, if that. It was over a minute of me waiting for iTunes to finish importing the music. Even double clicking a song through Finder to launch iTunes takes about 15-20 seconds to load the song up. Now, this Mac Mini is older, but it still is 1.2GHZ with a gig of RAM and should have NO problem loading an MP3 in under 3 seconds. Being that slow is just not acceptable for a modern day machine. Even a tiny little MP3 player can launch a song faster. The songs are on an external network drive but the PC using Winamp never had that problem.

The iTunes interface did not work for me at all and I have no doubt that there are plenty of other people out there who use it for Windows and love it. But for myself, I love Winamp and truly miss it. I don’t want a library of music, I just want a player. iTunes really wants to organize my music, not just play it.

Let’s talk photos now. Even before Dylan was born, me and Tamara took a lot of digital photos. We now have more than 15,000 shots on our shared drive. This is a LOT of pictures. iPhoto is a great piece of software but once again it wants to build a library of photos and organize them on its own. Even if you turn the organization off, it still wants to build a library. When I told it to import my photos from my shared NAS drive, I had to leave the computer on all night because it took so long for it to import everything. iPhoto suffers from the exact same problem I have with iTunes. If I move a file, iPhoto has no idea where to find it. I don’t want a photo library or organizer. I want a photo viewer. I come from a world of using Acdsee as my viewer and have come to love it. It does a lot of it’s own organizing, but it let’s me just browse my collection of folders and view what I have. iPhoto wants me to import everything and view them from within my library. I can’t just say browse a folder and show me the images. I thought I would even try to simply let it organize things on its own but the problem is that because me and Tamara share our pictures on an external network drive, she views them from a PC and I view them from a Mac. Therefore when the Mac organizes everything, it makes no sense on the PC. But if I leave things in the folder structure that the PC likes, iPhoto doesn’t like it very well. It imported every sub-folder I had as an “Event” which meant that under my wedding folder, I had about 10 sub folders, and all of those became individual events which was impossible to sort through with there being so many photos. I like what the app can do and the interface but I want to have more control, and I want to be able to just browse. Once again, the dumbing down of the interface removes functionality for hardcore folk like myself. I think the biggest thing with iPhoto is that because it looks at your library and not the filesystem, it can’t find files when they get moved because the library says otherwise. It’s annoying.

I have to say that I did not get a chance to do much with iMovie because it won’t read any of the captured video I already have as MPG files on my system. It does not recognize them even though they are saved as a standard Mpeg-2 DVD format right out of uLead Video. Tamara’s PC read them fine. Yes, I’m sure it really is just a codec problem but that is beside the point. Isn’t Mac supposed to just work, without hassle? Also, I got a copy of Toast Platinum which is basically Nero for the Mac and tried to encode a DivX movie to DVD so I could watch it as a DVD on my DVD player upstairs. Nero does this task in about 2-3 hours with relatively no hassle. Toast finished after I don’t know how many hours, and when it was done, the DVD was not recognized by the DVD player. Once again, something that I liked in Windows that I should have been able to do on the Mac but for some reason I couldn’t.

Therein lies my biggest issue I have been having. In order to get the Mac to work the way I would like it to, I’m having to either make major changes to the way applications work, or simply ignore the apps that make the Mac supposedly great, and download 3rd party applications that do more of what I want. I found a perfect photo viewer called Xee which just displays pictures and nothing else. In fact, I found it because a PC guy wanted a viewer like Acdsee for the Mac and found Xee online. Exactly what I wanted.

My problem is that if I have to go out and find all of these other apps and try and fine tune this machine to work the way I want, then it really isn’t making my life any easier. I wanted to get away from Windows because of it spontaneously giving up on certain pieces of hardware and not having to reinstall the OS every 6 months or so. But, if a reinstall means that I can still use my computer the way I like to, then so be it. I don’t have a problem doing that. I do have a problem with not being able to do the tasks I like, the way I like them, with the software that comes with the Mac, that is supposedly so great.

The fact that I have become so used to viewing images and playing music a certain way is probably the biggest reason why my Mac experience has not been as good as it could be. If iTunes would load my music faster, and work a little easier with organizing it, and iPhoto would act just as a browser, and nothing else, I would be more than happy to permanently switch over to using a Mac. But since the applications, as great as they are for what they do, don’t do what I want them to do, and don’t work the way I would like them to work. I will be closing the door on my Mac very soon.

The plan as it is today is to keep the Mac until after Christmas. I will likely then sell it off either to someone I know that would like one (Darren, you still interested?) or put it back up on eBay. I expect that in the new year, I will put out the cash and buy a new motherboard, cpu, ram, and hard drive to bring me up to date to something that will smoke the hell out of my old system and bring my PC system into the current age. I will likely spend less money than I would have on a new iMac. My old P4 2.8 works well but is not up to standard. It may become a replacement for the Maxtor NAS box. We’ll see.

So there folks, there’s my thoughts and feelings on the Mac. I’m very surprised and a little disappointed. I was really hoping that my Mac experience would turn out great and I’d be a huge fan of them. But for me, the match just isn’t there. Who’d a thunk it eh?