Switching To An Apple Mac

THE GHASTLY TRUTH

It's expensive, confusing, and time consuming.
The following discussion describes what drove me to switch from Windows to a Mac, and my (mostly awful) experience.

My profile: I'm a software developer, working mostly in Java/JEE and Oracle, including some web development. I often work by myself, and so, most of the time, I've no one to ask for technical help when I need it.

Why would I switch to a Mac?

This story begins when I tried to move to a MacBook about 6 months ago. At the time I was working for NYSE (the New York Stock Exchange) and I was given the opportunity of swapping my unloved and underpowered Dell for a new MacBook Pro; and, to be honest, carrying around a MacBook seemed to be something of a status symbol at NYSE, and I fell for all the hype.
In due course, my new Mac arrived in a shiny white box, in all its Applish glory. I won't bother to describe all the positive aspects of the Mac; needless to say it was beautifully designed, beautifully made, beautifully packaged, and a joy to unwrap and initially setup. But, twenty minutes later, I knew I'd made a terrible mistake. This thing was merely an enormously expensive toy, and I realized that I'd never be productive with it...

The trackpad was huge, but there were no "mouse buttons", instead just trackpad "tapping", and so therefore no alt-click function. I couldn't understand the triple-clicking approach that Apple's far-too-clever designers had implemented. I found this single aspect so frustrating that I didn't really have the heart to carry on.

The keyboard was unpleasant; it was beautiful, but there was no delete key (you had to hit shift-backspace); seems a minor point, but I found it very irritating, and, well, just stupid. And, of course, there was no Windows key, but instead, many alien key combinations where the command key (aka "Apple" key) seems to replace the ctrl key. I found the whole "universal menu" approach to be confusing and bizarre, and I simply didn't like the massive multicolored "dock" at the bottom of the display, but I can't explain why (well, probably because it was massive and multicolored compared to the discreet Taskbar in Windows). [Yes, I know you can make it smaller.] Lastly, physically, the MacBook was a wonderful work of art, a showcase of design in aluminum, but (in my opinion) form had been given priority over function; it was so pretty that I honestly couldn't see me tossing it into bags, throwing it into plastic trays to be X-rayed at airports, setting coffee cups on it, eating toast with buttery fingers while checking my email in the morning, and all the other dozens of ways that I maltreated my Dell: the Mac was just too pretty-looking to be abused as a workhorse. A friend of mine, coincidentally called Johnny Mac, commented casually that "Mac's are for little girls", or something, and so the whole experiment took another hit.

But never mind all that. The problem, for me, was that interacting with the Mac was an exercise in frustration. Primarily, the lack of mouse buttons on the trackpad meant that I simply couldn't (or to be more accurate, wasn't prepared to) continue. Since interacting with a computer represents the very foundation of computing, I went back to using my old Dell, with it's crumb-infested keyboard and fingerprint-covered display, and I was very glad to be back in the dirty, welcoming, and familiar land of Windows XP. Not long afterward, I left NYSE, and both the MacBook and the Dell went back to the NYSE IT department.

Did I overreact to my whole experience with the MacBook? Probably. But I genuinely hated it.

I replaced the NYSE Dell with another Dell laptop; this time a shiny new Latitude E6500, which had Vista installed. Do I like Vista? No. I hate it more than OS X.

Six Months Later

I need to develop an iPhone app. I have a very nice LG flatscreen monitor that I'm not using, and so I decide that the only thing to do is to bite-the-bullet and buy a super-cheap Mac mini; and off I go cheerily to the Apple shop in the mall in Towson, MD.

Alarmingly, almost an hour later, I come out of the Apple shop carrying a huge box containing a very heavy 24" iMac at 3 times the price of a mini... oh, and a copy of VMware's Fusion. I've also bought a full-size Apple keyboard so that there will be a delete key (because iMac's come with the stupid mini keyboard). There is a look of madness in my eyes, and I have a slightly sick feeling... something to do with the fact that I might have just wasted close to $2000. What on Earth am I thinking?

The Plan

My new grandiose plan is this: I hate Vista, and I'm definitely not going to bother with Windows 7 (aka Vista 2.0). I mean, I think I understand what Microsoft are trying to do with Vista and Windows 7. They want to make Windows cool, make it exciting and user friendly, make it virus proof, safe for kids, and so on. The problem is, apparently, I'm no longer within their target demographic. I don't care about exciting and user friendly. I want a usable tool that won't let me down. What I really want is XP. But since I have an iPhone app to develop, here I am carrying a Mac. I can run iTunes on the iMac; I can download Firefox so that I can avoid Safari; and for everything else (i.e. Java development, using Office 2003, etc) I'll run XP (in the old marvelous Windows "Classic" style with the Maple color scheme) as a virtual machine on the iMac. Apple's so-called Mighty Mouse (groan) can be configured to have 2 buttons, just like a real mouse, so I can avoid all the triple-clicking nonsense. And, as I've already mentioned, the full-size Apple keyboard has a delete key. I've found that by moving the dock to the right side of the display, it's okay. Everything else I'll have to just get used to, but the main problems are solved, and, in fact, I quite like the whole setup.

So then, with these fixes in place, and mentally burning all of Apple's "they just work better" marketing spin/nonsense, Macs are okay after all. However, at the moment, I remain willfully incapable of putting up with a MacBook's keyboard and trackpad.

A Note on Fusion

I was quickly sold on the VM concept: especially the idea of having multiple VM's configured for different purposes, which will be great for software development projects. The VMware literature claims that you can easily create a virtual appliance from your existing Windows computer (or words to that effect) using their free downloadable converter. Standing in the Apple shop, I pictured myself taking my old Sony VAIO out of the cupboard, which runs XP, and I'd strip it down, and create a high-performance "base" XP SP2 image from that, which I'd then use to create multiple project-specific configurations. That didn't work. When you buy a laptop, or indeed any computer, you typically buy an OEM-installed OS that's locked to that specific hardware. I wasted half-a-day trying to crack Microsoft's WPA (Windows Product Activation) scheme with no joy; I toyed with the idea of downloading an illegal pre-built XP appliance, but didn't succumb to the temptation, mostly because I didn't think it would solve the WPA issue; finally, with grim resignation, I went to Amazon and ordered a new copy of XP Professional (for System Builders) at more ghastly expense, which of course is what Microsoft wants. Anyway, unless I've got it all wrong somehow, VMware are telling a pretty big porky-pie saying that you can "convert" your existing Windows computer. Their claim is only true if you own a non-OEM version of Windows, and that's a tiny percentage of Windows users out there.

Auto-Starting a VM in Fusion

It's obvious when you know: you can control which VM (if any) starts-up when you start Fusion via the star buttons in the Virtual Machine Library window, or you can find and modify the VMDefaultVM property in the Library » Preferences » com.vmware.fusion.plist file. Obviously, set this property to null if you don't want any particular VM to start automatically.

Running XP in Fusion: Quirks

A few quirks with easy solutions:
  (a) I've configured my Mighty Mouse to work as a 2-button mouse, as discussed above. It's still physically a 1-button mouse, but (according to Apple) the button can sense which side of it you're actually pressing. This doesn't work too well. I typically rest both fingers on the mouse buttons (like everyone else) and that seems to confuse the sensors. I've learned to click with one finger, while lifting the other one. It took me several days of frustration to discover this.
  (b) Shift-clicking and ctrl-clicking to select multiple files from a list (to copy, move, etc) is a problem. Shift-clicking works just fine, but a ctrl-click is interpreted as an alt-click. The trick is to hold down both the ctrl and command keys together:

      XP shift-click = XP-in-Fusion shift-click
      XP ctrl-click = XP-in-Fusion ctrl-command-click

Unfortunately, the ctrl-command key combination also bumps the VM out of full-screen mode, which can be very annoying... however you can supress this by holding the shift key down before you release the ctrl-command keys... but this requires 3 fingers, patience, and a little practice.

Super OS

Now that Fusion is resident on my iMac, I have easy access to "real" Linux distributions, running as other VM's on Leopard. I'm a fan of Super OS (a "remastered" version of Ubuntu). You can download a prebuilt Super OS virtual appliance here: BAGSIDE.COM/BAGVAPP

Conclusions

XP remains the greatest OS ever, especially for Java developers... in my opinion. Microsoft quite clearly lost the plot after that, as I'm sure they well know. If I was Microsoft, I'd think about continuing to support and develop XP as a distinct product line from Vista/W7, even at an operating loss, just to keep developers like me on board to some limited extent, because I'm not going to go to Windows 7, now that I'm on a Mac. But I would buy a future XP upgrade: XP 2010, XXP, or XP Special, or whatever they want to call it, to run as a VM.