Blog : Macs Just Rule

Well, I must admit that I've always been partial to Macs. My first post-DOS "real" computer in college was an old PowerComputing Mac clone. I even worked as a Mac technician at my college. But when I first started my business, I bought a killer 17" LCD Toshiba PC laptop because I thought that a PC might be better, since the business world seems to prefer PCs. And, don't get me wrong, it's been a great machine. But recently we replaced our home computer with a Mac Mini and there's nothing that really demonstrates the superiority of a Mac to a PC until you have them sitting next to each other and you try to do the same thing on both machines. For example, I have a Windows Mobile phone: a Motorola Q. When I first got it, I was surprised at how easy it was to sync with my PC laptop. I installed the utility that came with the phone and plugged it in and my calendar and contacts just synced with Outlook, the way it should be. Wow, that was easy. Great!

Now, here's where it got hairy. I use Google Calendar, as it's great because I can have several shared calendars and my wife can put things on our calendar from her work. That gave it an advantage over Outlook, and besides that, Outlook, although powerful as it is, is a bloated piece of software and after having the PC for 6 months, the whole system was getting sluggish. Keep in mind that this machine was top of the line 6 months earlier. So I was starting to get tired of waiting on Outlook to render my calendar. So I needed a way to sync my Google calendar with my Outlook calendar. After a web search, I found CompanionLink, which sounded like it would do what I needed. 2-way syncing. So I bought this utility and installed it. To my dissatisfaction, I had to manually run the CompanionLink program everytime I wanted to sync the calendars, and Outlook had to not be open when I ran it, otherwise I got an error. At first it worked pretty well, but then the syncs started taking HOURS to complete. What's that all about? So I pretty much had to remember to run the update utility at the end of the day...which never happened.

My laptop was acting a little screwy yesterday, so I thought, I wonder if I can sync my phone to the Mac Mini, which I'd had for about 6 months. I thought it would probably be a pain since it's a Windows Mobile phone, but I decided to do a little research. Although it wasn't quite as plug and play as I've found most things to be on the Mac, it was remarkably easy. I did have to purchase The Missing Sync utility to allow my Windows Mobile phone to sync with my Mac's Calendar, contacts, etc. But I installed it, plugged in my phone, and voila, it synced perfectly. And to my ecstatic discovery, I could even automatically sync iTunes playlists (and photos) with my phone, and now every time I sync my phone The Missing Sync Utility will look and see when the last time my playlist was updated, and according to my settings, if it's time, it will automatically refresh the music on my phone with new MP3s from my selected iTunes playlist. I can even tell it to leave a certain amount of space on my phone's memory, so it doesn't fill it completely up with MP3s. Wow.

Okay, so my phone syncs with my Mac, and it's just as easy as it was on my PC. Now for the hard part, getting iCal on the Mac to sync with Google Calendar. Enter Spanning Sync. Yes, this is another utility I had to pay for, but I had to pay for the PC utility too, so I can't count that as a drawback. Here's the good part. I installed the utility and hit sync, and voila my iCal was synced both ways with all of my Google Calendars. AND it checks for updates regularly every hour, so I don't have to remember to sync anything. And it takes WAY less time than my PC did. Now I'm a happy, synced up guy.

So, yes, I know it's been a running debate since the beginning of time, but I have to admit, things are just easier to do on my Mac. Things work the way they are supposed to out of the box. My Mac boots up faster, and doesn't get horribly sluggish when I leave it on for weeks at a time without a reboot, unlike my PC which almost grinds to a halt if I don't reboot every day. My Mac interface looks cooler than Windows XP on my laptop (and better than Vista from what I've seen of it) and Macs are less susceptible to virii and other malware. I guess it just comes down to one thing: I love my Mac.

So, although I'll need to keep a PC around to do browser checks on the websites we're developing, my next purchase this fall is going to be a MacBook Pro. The "fun" part will be converting my copy of Adobe CS to a Mac version, as I upgrade to CS3. But after this experience, I know that it will be worth it, and probably not near as tricky as I fear.

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