making The Switch: The ineffable user experience

Ouch. It's been awhile since I blogged! 

I can weigh the pros and cons of my new MacBook, but when I add them up, 2 + 2 = 5.  There's something hard to quantify about the way the whole system works together, predictably and well.  I guess with Wintel boxes, I tend to assume that commonplace interactions will not go well the first time.  Whether it's hooking up a new printer, installing a new application, or even plugging in a new mouse, I don't expect it to work without plenty of tweaking and friction.  Most likely this relates to the enormously broad array of legacy hardware and software that Windows must be compatible with.

I once got in a conversation with a former Microsoft employee about the long turnaround time on bugfixes for Office.  He gave me a number of good reasons, including the many third-party add-ons the product supports, and the many platforms it runs on. Nevertheless, I instantly had to bite my tongue to keep from interrupting that I simply didn't care about any of those features. Clearly near-universal compatibility is important to Microsoft, but not to me, and probably not to any individual user. I wanted to respond that Microsoft needed to meet my individual needs faster, or I wouldn't want to stick around. Our different value systems meant we could barely understand each other's point.

Macs on OSX are unencumbered by decades of legacy code and hardware, and if I had to guess, that makes everything run just a little smoother.  That's good enough for me.

Comments

[Kendall]

Totally agree. It's not always easy to say why the Mac experience is better, but it does tend to be much smoother without all the fuss and muss.