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When Is There a Good Time to "Switch" to Apple?
AllNines asks: "With all the hype of MacWorld and the compelling keynote given by Steve Jobs about the upcoming Tiger and Spotlight, I am thinking about 'switching' (Linux user since '97) but I am not sure the time is right. It seems like the PowerBooks are getting very long in the tooth and the iPods are due for a major rev. When is the right time to jump on the Apple ship? Am I going to get burned by a sluggish overpriced laptop that is updated next month?"
If you're a sucker for things that look cool, you've got deep pockets, and you don't care if it doesn't perform, then by all means go for it.
Alternatively, if you have any kind of budget, or if you want a computer that actually *does* stuff instead of just sitting there like an artist's doorstop, you might want to stick with PC-based stuff. Without exception, anything PC-based is faster and cheaper. If you really need something that looks cool, shop around for a nice-looking laptop or a fancy desktop case.
Grab.
I found the Macintosh laptops to be a big disappointment. First of all, there were hardware problems: one died within a few weeks, the replacement didn't play DVDs properly. The processor is pretty slow, too: even in its heyday, a G4 wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and today it is really not competitive anymore. And it's not true that the thing never crashes; it's not bad, but the GUI will hang on occasion, and I have had it crash, too.
Then, your only real choice for an office suite is Microsoft Office. If you want a laptop just to run Microsoft Office, I suppose it is better than a Windows laptop. OpenOffice has too many limitations on the Mac (among other things, forget about using it for presentations) and it requires you to fiddle with X11, which isn't well integrated (and also needs to be installed). iWork isn't a serious academic or business tool either: no spreadsheet, no math, limited drawing.
The iLife applications are useless toys: iPhoto doesn't let you fix even gross problems with images, iMovie has limitations on what you can important and export (looks like they are deliberate). You probably need to upgrade to expensive commercial packages if you want anything that's more than a toy.
I thought there were going to be a bunch of nice outliners and brainstorming tools for Macintosh--lots of them are advertised with great fanfare and colorful ads, but they were pretty much a disappointment, too: proprietary formats, complex UIs, and limited functionality. There are better open source tools available than that.
Fink is supposed to be the way to install more of a real UNIX/Linux environment on Macintosh, but I had no end of trouble. Worse, for many packages, there are two versions of it: the Fink version and a non-Fink version. Some Mac applications assume one, some the other, and if you install both, you run into conflicts. Cygwin on Windows runs more reliable than Fink on Macintosh.
Macintosh network configuration is supposed to be really well done, but it's pretty cumbersome, no better than Windows. Yes, you get a pull down menu of wireless basestations in your surroundings right on the menu bar. But if you use anything other than the default network settings, you still need to dig into the network configuration dialog, which matches Windows in its obscurity. Software like Switcher-X shows that you can do better--why can't Apple at least ship decent network configuration tools with the Mac?
Macintosh also promises to integrate well into Windows and UNIX networks, but that's an unfulfilled promise, too. Yes, it sort of speaks SMB and NFS, but actually getting automounting and name services to work is at least as much of a pain as on other UNIX systems, and there is a lot of non-standard stuff you have to do on Mac.
And then there is the GUI. It's slow. It's non-standard, in look-and-feel as well as in its APIs. It has a theme that you either love or hate, but you can't change it very much (at least not out of the box).
Coming from Linux, where all the UNIX and GUI tools are integrated, self-updating, and everything just works, and where there is a wide choice of toolkits and programming environments, and at least three different free office suites, the Macintosh was a big disappointment and a money pit.
So, if you are asking when you should switch, my answer is: not yet, not until Apple fixes some really fundamental problems with the Macintosh operating system and GUI, until they actually get serious about making it a competitive UNIX workstation (which means, among other things, decent X11 support), until the hardware is up to modern standards, and until there is more decent application software available for it. If you do switch now, I expect you'll come back to Linux again. I did, as did several other people I know.