How to Figure Out How They're Screwing You

Yeah, after I posted my comment about having started out wanting a Mac and never gotten one, I received just enough encouragement here (which, if I’m being honest, I may have been fishing for) to nudge me off the Mac cliff.

I’ve had My 13-inch MacBook Air for a few months now, and it has become my primary computer.

I really do like this computer a lot. The battery life on this thing doesn’t seem possible. It goes days of use as my primary computer between charges. I have suffered far fewer glitches, far fewer crashes, and the operating system seems much smoother, faster, and more reliable than Windows overall. I understand this and the battery life are due to the tight integration between the operating system and Apple’s custom designed chips. It seems to work, but I don’t understand how. Also, there are a lot of little things, like batch file renaming, task automation, and automatic backups, that are built into the Mac OS, but on Windows require extra software (if you want them to work well).

And, to be honest, it just looks and feel super cool. I’m old enough that the first personal computer I owned looked like someone stacked four large pizza boxes, spray painted them beige, then sat a small tube TV on top of them. The idea that my entire primary computer, including the monitor, keyboard, and pointing device, folds up to the size of an old issue of Newsweek just reminds me that I live in the future.

That said, learning a different operating system after decades of Windows use hasn’t been effortless. There is more focus on keyboard shortcuts, which may feel easier someday, but today isn’t that day. The app installation process is simpler and more reliable in theory, in practice it feels really weird to me. And I still can’t get used to the idea that closing an app’s only open window doesn’t close the app.

Also, this thing was not cheap (Note: that is a complaint, not a brag). It’s not just that a Mac costs more than a Windows machine. Because they control the hardware so tightly and it’s impossible to upgrade after the fact, the model of Mac you want costs much more than the already more expensive Mac you don’t. You get what you pay for, and I believe that I have gotten good value for money out of this thing, but dropping the money I did on an object that, again, is the size of an old issue of Newsweek, did give me pause.