Macs Just Rule
Posted on July 21st, 2007
full-screenWell, 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.
