One month with our iMac

Alas, I don't get to go to Apple's developer conference next week. I heard they sold out pretty early, and I couldn't really justify HP sending me since (1) I'm not a developer and (2) my products don't run on Macs (sigh).

But I do have some observations after living with our iMac for a month:

• It's a delight to use. It does the same things as a Windows PC, but it does them faster, more consistently, more beautifully, and more thoughtfully. There's something about the visual design of the OS that makes nearly every application pop -- even the cross-platform ones such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
  
  
• The iMac is very, very quiet. We still have our Dell and hadn't realized how much noise its fan and other components were making until we starting running the whisper-quiet iMac.
  
  
• It was relatively straightforward to switch, but definitely not "free". Most documents came over without a hitch (including Microsoft's new Microsoft Office 97 file formats like .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx -- Apple iWorks and TextEdit open these files just fine), but it was a bit of a pain converting from Picasa to iPhoto. They store and search photos differently, and unfortunately you have to fuss with this a bit to convert. Also was more of a pain converting to sync my iPod from my iMac rather than my Windows machine than I had expected it would be.
  
  
• Windows runs fine on my iMac via VMware Fusion. I still use Windows for a few things: (1) Quicken, (2) watching videos from Netflix, and (3) Outlook for work emails (via the work VPN). For (1) and (2), there are no known substitutes (don't get my started about how pathetic Quicken for Mac is). For (3), I haven't been able to get OpenVPN working though some of my coworkers have.
  
  
• The on-line help + Mac community are very helpful. I've been able to find answers to my questions very easily. The on-line help answers my questions about half the time, and Google delivers the balance. In fact, the info I need is typically the first or second search result in Google. Try that on Windows.
  
  
• The OS still matters. In this Web-centric world of ours, I was surprised at how much the OS still matters. How?

1. Rock solid. No random reboots, no blue-screen-of-death, no super long boot or go-to-sleep cycle, no cryptic error messages, no strange lags where all of a sudden the GUI becomes non-responsive.
2. Search works. It helps me find files because its built in search (Spotlight) is fast, useful, and completely transparent.
3. It's consistent, which encourages its applications to be consistent. Consistency helps me be more productive. The OS and its apps are consistent in the big things (like application installation and removal), the medium things (applications typically store their preferences in the /library directory) and the small things like keyboard shortcuts: cmd-w always always closes a window, cmd-comma always opens preferences, cmd-m always minimizes an application.
4. It lets me use the computer. MacOS lets me use the computer's resources rather than consuming them to scan for viruses, clean up the registry, defragment its hard drives, index documents, and more. You don't notice how much time you spend on the care and feeding of your PC until you start using an OS where you don't do it.
5. Time Machine just works. I've used it twice already. Once was to rescue my Thunderbird address book after an accidental sync with Plaxo completely erased all my contacts. It's slick.
   

A few things I don't like about the Mac:

• You can only resize a window from the bottom right corner instead of any edge of the window.
  
• Keyboard shortcuts for cursor movement and copy, paste, undo, etc. are different from their Windows counterparts. I've remapped the keyboard, but the problem is that the Mac uses a different modifier key to skip words (option + right/left arrow) versus copy, paste, undo (command-c, x, and z) -- whereas Windows uses the same key (ctrl).
• I miss the Window-E key to open Windows Explorer and Windows-D to hide all apps and show the desktop. I use Quicksilver to do something similar for the Finder, but it doesn't always work the way I expect it to.
• My Mac sometimes forgets its modifier key mappings, a well documented problem with external USB keyboards. To fix, I have to open the keyboard preferences and "remind" it. Lame.
• The .mac service is a missed opportunity: over-priced and under-powered. Maybe Apple will announce a more useful feature set with lower pricing next week. Apple should either make .mac competitive or make it easier for the native applications to integrate with the winning services such as Flickr, Smugmug, and regular Web hosting services.
  
• Fusion slows the machine down quite a bit. Hopefully this is because it's a beta and the production version will speed it up. Also it's not quite fast to run even old Windows games.