I am Mac

I am Mac. Finally. I have been wishing of owning one ever since I had the first glimpse of it at the newly opened Apple showroom in Kolkata way back in 2006. At that time, I can only dream of owning one, but cannot even think of buying it. When I came to Australia, I almost bought it when I was shopping for my first laptop. Again, the exorbitant price and the okay kind of configuration I am getting at the price I am going to pay made me step back. I zeroed in on a fourteen inch windows notebook which I used for around a year. It performed marginally well, the key board and RAM eating vista operating system giving me night mares. One fine day, the monitor went blank never waking up again. A little research revealed that the mother board got burnt. Giving it to repair, I started search for my second laptop. This time, I want it to be Mac though I was weighing one or two other options. The final shortlist was Macbook White and Dell Studio 15. Dell Studio 15 is the king of the 15 inch laptops where for an economical price you can get everything you can dream of in your laptop, if you do not mind carrying a 15.4 (designer laptop) or 15.6 (regular) inch notebook PC with you. However Apple made a mouth watering offer by deciding to reduce the price of its white macbook range. What more? It made the configuration almost same as its new range of Mac-books at a moderately economical price. With a 13.3 inch screen, 2 GB RAM, 9600GS NVIDIA graphics card, 120GB hard disk, Leopard Operating System, iLife 2009 and the Apple brand name, it is the best value for money laptop in its range right now.

Though I had some experience of working on two Power Mac G5s in the test lab of my company, the experience of switching on the macbook the first time is an experience I will never forget. The thought process that went into the design of mac can be seen in the packaging as well. And the Leopard operating system which apple calls the world’s most advanced operating system comes along with iLife 2009. iLife and other Leopard software will almost take care of all the users needs with iMail, iChat, iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, Garage Band and some more. These are not just another software but are thoughtfully designed products keeping the customer’s needs in mind and honed over the years of development and maintenance. For instance, take iPhoto. Take a photo, select a face in the photo and give it a name. iPhoto will try to search, identify the face in other photos and sort them. Not just these, Leopard is littered with such small thoughtful tweaks that would delight you. It reads documents, newspapers and webpages for you in a choice of voices. It tells you time if you ask it. You are listening to music on iTunes and someone called you on iChat. Once you pick the call, iTunes will pause the song and continues once you are done with it. If you plug in an iPod to your macbook, it shows the icon of the iPod on the desktop exactly same model and color. This was later introduced into iTunes version 8 as well. You can learn guitar and piano on garage band. One more delightful feature I found very useful is spotlight. A universal search utility on the mac found on the top right cornet using which you can search for file, meaning of a word, calculations, etc.

Coming from the windows world, it might take some time to get used to mac navigation. Especially the right click. Mac too has a right click, but is replaced by control and a tap on the trackpad. The multi-touch trackpad makes browsing very easy. Put both the fingers on the trackpad and move your fingers in the direction you want to scroll. A double tap is equivalent to double click. However pressing the ‘Enter’ would edit the name of the file instead of opening it. Most of the keyboard operations are paired by command button with an alphabet key. If you want to explore more into the mac world go for iWork, Logic (the music library which most of our music directors from Rahman to Devisri Prasad uses) and more. Built on strong unix background mac is almost devoid of any viruses. And if you have windows only software which you want to use, install either XP or Vista using boot camp. Believe me, windows work so well on mac that some times surpasses the built for windows machines.

Now the drawbacks. On any scale, the price of a mac can be said to be exorbitant. Any mac accessory you want to buy will make your jaw drop seeing the price tag. If your machine is not covered under the Apple protection plan, you are gone for a toss. Lovers of softwares like winamp, gom player, etc are going to miss them as there is no mac equivalent released. Voice and Video chats with friends is very limited as all popular messengers which provide free voice and video calls in windows world do not provide the same in mac. Only recently did yahoo introduce voice chat in its mac messenger. iChat, Apple’s chat software supports only AIM for video chats. This can be more or less compensated by web version of google talk. Mozilla Firefox has a very limited add-ons compared to its windows counterpart. I also observed that firefox 3 crashes a lot on mac. I had some problem reading telugu sites on the safari browser. Later searching the internet I found the pothana font which almost solved my problem.

For all its drawbacks, if you do not mind to spend a penny extra, the machine will almost delight you. It almost never crashes, though there are some exceptions.