my name is not matt

The ele­phant in my tech­nol­ogy room is whether I am going to make the switch to Apple. I am con­vinced that Apple’s oper­at­ing sys­tem is vastly more sta­ble than Win­dows. That alone, war­rants a switch. I have become increas­ingly frus­trated with nag­ging Win­dows issues over the years. It’s par­tic­u­larly unnerv­ing when think you have your com­puter hum­ming along, only to dis­cover that it decided to throw a lit­tle tantrum, usu­ally in the form of a failed task accom­pa­nied by an error code. Just a few posts back, I briefly lamented that a ghost has appar­ently taken over my Zune. For­get Sarah Palin. If you want to truly find a road to nowhere, wan­der around in Microsoft help/troubleshooting web­site for a while. You’re sure to get lost.

As these prob­lems with my (and my wife’s) com­puter per­sist, I am more urgently look­ing at my options. Win­dows  7 or Apple’s Snow Leopard-run com­put­ers. I am attempt­ing to be emo­tion­ally detached, because I’m, admit­tedly, am nat­u­rally drawn to Apple. There is sheer beauty in the design if their prod­ucts. The approach the com­pany takes to craft­ing prod­ucts and labor­ing over the right mate­ri­als is noth­ing short of brilliant.

I truly love min­i­mal­ist design!

In spite of all my indus­trial design slurp­ing (hey…I was wrapped up watch­ing a doc­u­men­tary on the Helvit­ica font), I am capa­ble of being rather objec­tive and prag­matic about the com­par­i­son of these two sys­tems. For one, Microsoft doesn’t make computers/hardware. Given the less-than-stellar reli­a­bil­ity of the Zune, I’d say that’s a smart move. Apple, on the other hand, does pro­duce hard­ware as well as soft­ware. There are some inher­ent ben­e­fits to the ver­ti­cal inte­gra­tion. Apple’s core soft­ware pretty much mim­ics the hard­ware. It’s clean, straight­for­ward, and intu­itive. Put all these together and you’re left won­der­ing, “Why am I even debat­ing this?” Well, can we say Apple sticker shock! Beyond that (and that’s a big beyond), there’s no good rea­son to be foot-dragging on mak­ing a switch…right?

Not…so…fast.

So I was in Chicago this past week­end, vis­it­ing my like-a-brother, close friend of over 20 years. He’s been an Apple devo­tee since we were in col­lege together. He’s what they call an early adopter. While in Chicago, I used his iMac and Mac­Book to check some email, send a few tweets, and even write the blog install­ment about want­ing to read more books. It didn’t take long for my blood pres­sure to rise as I dis­cov­ered that I was mak­ing typos over and over again. What the…??! I am a fairly good typ­ist. I used to push out 100+ wpm with less than 2 errors per page, but I’m sure that num­ber is some­where in the sub-70s with a few more errors. Nev­er­the­less, the fre­quency of mis­takes was alarm­ing.  It was the same on the iMac and the Mac­book. What is going on?

Let’s look at the keyboards.

Apple

My Toshiba Satel­lite Laptop

One of the first things that threw me off was the Com­mand or “apple key.” It per­forms some of the same func­tions as the “Con­trol” key on a Windows-system key­board, but it’s in a dif­fer­ent place. Cut-and-paste was a night­mare. I kept hit­ting the option key. I was about to scream every time I hit the wrong key.

Oh…where the hell is home and end? I learned from my boy that you hit the com­mand key and the arrow keys, but I like a des­ig­nated but­ton.  Per­haps it’s because I am a touch typ­ist, and I need the keys to be where my mus­cle mem­ory takes my fin­gers. I’m pretty open to tech­nol­ogy change, but this could poten­tially be a deal-breaker.

I know what you’re think­ing. What’s the big deal? Would I seri­ously think about stay­ing with a Windows-based com­puter solely for the key­board lay­out? Prob­a­bly not, but I would be lying if it didn’t make me pause and won­der if it’s a bar­rier to entry. As I men­tioned above, I get all goo­gly eyed over Apple designs, but the key­board really me stumped. I don’t really see an inher­ent design flaw with the 104-key key­board. Sure, drop the num­ber pad. I like it, but don’t need it. That shrinks the key­board a bit. I must say, though, that I have come to be par­tic­u­larly wed to my home, end, delete and page up/page down keys. Much like most of Apple’s design, these keys make sense. They serve a pur­pose. They just work.

There are sim­i­lar nit-picky things about Apples that would take some time, and likely a good dose of curs­ing, before I got used to them. A few friends have shared that it typ­i­cally takes about three months to con­vert fully to the Apple sys­tem struc­ture, nomen­cla­ture, keys and short­cuts. In the scheme of things, that’s not too bad, but I may have to type on some Apple key­boards for a while before I toss in the towel on my trusty 104-key.

To be fair, a num­ber of 13″ or 15.4″ lap­tops don’t have ded­i­cated keys for home, end, page up/page down.

So, I can’t com­pletely lean in on Apple for a design flaw when it’s shared with some oth­ers. I still don’t like it, though.

I’d like to hear from you. In my mind, there are two, maybe three, camps out there. Those that who have used Macs for as long as they can remem­ber. Those who use both, and fre­quently switch back and forth. And, finally, those who recently made the switch to Apple. Nat­u­rally, I sus­pect, unless you work in graphic arts, pho­tog­ra­phy, or a pretty pro­gres­sive office that only uses Apples, most users switch back-and-forth between Apples and Win­dows PCs.  Please share your expe­ri­ences, con­ver­sion tales, and gen­eral accounts of being a Mac or PC person.