Ok so this is going to be my first blog post on my new Portfolio Website and initially I couldn’t think what to write about. So I settled on the thing that was most current to me at this moment in time…

Choices

I’ve recently purchased my first Mac in the form of a 13″ MacBook Pro and I’m going to run through my initial thoughts on it. Now let me make this clear this is by no means a ‘PC vs Mac’ comparison and I really don’t want to get into that debate. In my opinion there is no ‘best’ Operating System it depends on the needs of the individual. If you are looking for value for money and something you are comfortable in using for most people a Windows based computer is the perfect option. If you are looking for complete flexibility in being able to customise your computer experience then Linux is also a great option. I’ve had a brief experience of using Ubuntu and I have to say considering it’s free and open source roots is really is quite amazing.

Why ?

So why did I switch to Mac ? For me the main deciding factors were some of the available applications and I won’t hide it, I was completely taken in by both the internal and external beauty of the Mac platform. As a Web Designer I think working on a Mac can definitely help to make you more productive. Obviously I have only just made the switch so it is probably a bit pre-mature to be making such a bold statement but with the hundreds plugin available for applications such as Coda and Expresso I think it could well be true.

Price and Performance

Being a student price was is an issue for me and as far as I’m concerned Mac’s are slightly over priced and it could be argued poor value for money in terms of the specifications they offer. While it’s easy to get drawn in to this considering I don’t use many ‘power’ applications like video and complex photo editing this isn’t so much of an issue for me. I use Photoshop but only for Web based images so they are often quite small in terms of the dimensions and therefore file size so are not so demanding to run.

Productivity

One thing I love about Mac is that if you know the right tricks simple tasks that could be long and tedious can be significantly sped up. What kind of things am I talking about, well here are a few examples. Spotlight search makes searching for files fast and effortless. All other OS offer search features obviously so this isn’t exclusive to Mac but in my experience Spotlight is much faster and more accurate in the results it returns. There are various other things such as; built in colour picker, spaces, dashboard and stacks.

Summary

So to bring an end to quite a disjointed and wavering post, I love my new Mac but am not going to fall into the trap of labeling it the ‘best’ operating system, even if it does suit me perfectly..