I wrote a dorky update about my new laptop a few months ago. Now Emily is considering buying a Mac. She asked me why she should or should not. I decided to recap my thoughts thus far:

• I’m using a 15 inch powerbook G4, of which I am quite aesthetically fond.
• Peripherals for a Mac just work. You plug them in, and they work. iPod, mouse, bluetooth cell phone, digital camera, I just plugged them all in, and they worked. Open my address book and it syncs from my phone and updates all my contacts into the iPod. Plug in the camera and iPhoto loads and asks my if I want to import my photos. Once I let go of the need to understand why all these things work, i found all of this quite enjoyable.
• Programs crash just as often as with Windows XP. (Not all that often.)
• There’s lots of little things that PC’s do better (well, I think so), but in most cases, apps exist to fix these little things, you just have to find them. Example, you know how on most laptops if you drag your finger down the right hand side of the trackpad, it will scroll whatever window you have open? That doesn’t exist anywhere in the ibook/powerbook - it drove my crazy. It was one of those things that was seriously hard for me to work around, and was slowing me down considerably. Luckily. Someone wrote a new driver for the trackpad, and for 7 dollarsfree, I am happy as a clam.
• If you buy one, dig out your school ID and get the educational discount, they’ll give this to you right at any apple store. I think I got 200 bucks off my laptop.
• I have 768MB of ram in mine and if I am using Safari, Mail, and photoshop, things get sluggish. 1GB+ of ram highly recommended.
• I’ve yet to find a good, plain, os x text editor a really like.
• I hated the built in mail app until I understood how it works, now I think it’s excellent. Entourage (the mac version of Outlook) kind of sucked in my opinion, though I didn’t give it much of a chance.
• Despite what they say, Mac’s and PC’s on a corporate network don’t always mix. Unless a windows based corporate network is very much up to date (i.e. they run Active Directory), mac’s and pc’s don’t play all that well together. I’m sure the converse is true as well. I still have trouble logging in remotely to my work network from my mac at home.
• Built in wireless is excellent, long battery life so far, and much prettier than any other laptop.
• It’s quite nice not having to worry about viruses, spyware, adware, trojans etc..
• I think Apple is on crack still sticking to the one button mouse. Two button mice, with a scroll wheel are better. I don’t think anyone will ever convince me otherwise. External mice with said features work as they do on pc.
• It’s unix based, so you can drop to a command line and do a lot of things you’re used to. You can run pine if you so desire.
• Applications are weird, and I still haven’t quite figured them out. On a PC I’m used to installing an application and it extracting and copying hundreds of files all over my hard drive. On a mac, most of the time, applications are just one huge file (OK, I think they’re some sort of top-secret directory full of files, that I just don’t see as a directory). To install firefox, you download one 10 MB file, and drag it into your application folder. Click on it to run it. Delete it to un-install it. There is no add/remove programs function really. Kind of disconcerting at first, but clearly has it’s advantages. This is probably not nearly as distressing to normal, less nerdy people.