The Linux guys are buying Macs?
I’ve recently purchased a MacBook pro to replace my aging HP Pavilion laptop that served me well through out the years. Now, it’s noteworthy to mention that no Microsoft product ever saw the light of day on my old HP. Instead, it ran a few flavour of Linux to eventually settle on Ubuntu for the rest of its 4 year life.
I was happy with my Ubuntufied HP. I tinkered. I tweaked. Everything worked in the end. It was great fun and it taught me so much of the command line and of Unix which is so coveted in today web world.
Eventually it died.. and it was time to replace it. At first, I never considered the MacBook. There was no way Apple was going to have me buy one of it’s ridiculously locked down products at some outrageous price.
But all reviews I read kept pointing me to this notebook. Its superior build quality, excellent keyboard, awesome trackpad.. To me, a developer this was all somewhat fluff. I was after usability on the system itself! I was after.. the terminal.. Now, this was one thing that REALLY sold me on a Mac. The Unix environment is second to none. As much fun as it is tweak the living hell out of Ubuntu, there are just some days when you install something you just want it to work out of the box. Mac scores serious usability points for being a unix environment and just “working”.
So, add up the fact that it’s a great machine with a more and more supported OS every day that’s based on Unix.. and you might have a winner. At least that’s what sold me in the end.
I still think that Apple as a company are a bunch of pricks. The way they treat their customers is outrageously obscene. But someone seems to have done their homework when it comes to usability which seems to be keeping people coming back.