brinking - nabeel hyatt: Living Apple, week two

December 05, 2006

Living Apple, week two

So far so good. I've lasted two weeks with a MacBook and so far seem to not be missing some amazing new cultural wave happening that is Windows-only (Napster, Doom, anyone?).

Using an Apple feels a lot like using an appliance, compared to the computer bazaar that is Windows. It is wonderfully slick and cohesive, but I simultaneously get the eerie feeling that I just entered a Jobsian Brave New World and it is much more totalitarian than anything Gates' devised. It's just prettier.

In general though, very positive.

Gotta love iSync syncing my Nokia E62 (thanks to Novamedia) and SE K800i up to Google, iCal, and the Exchange server simultaneously.
WiFi performance is unbelievable -- I'm seeing 12 networks where I used to see 4.
Big misses are the lack of Roboform, the slightly slower Flash performance (important for rapid rounds of K-Dice) and the lack of TivoToGo. Although the last has been remedied (thanks for the link Bijan).

Dec 5, 2006 11:15:23 AM

3 Comments

Nabeel, I have two suggestions to make your mac life more fun:

Quicksilver: At its most basic an app/file/URL keyboard launcher, but it goes far beyond that. Much, much better than cmd+space spotlight launching. I have yet to find a decent windows equivalent.
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

TUAW: Great Apple blog that will keep you on top of new mac apps and news.
http://www.tuaw.com/

Posted by: Prashant Agarwal | December 05, 2006 at 02:19 PM

Interestingly - I went the other direction. http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/002098.html. I bet that you don't rely on Exchange...

Posted by: Brad Feld | December 06, 2006 at 09:02 AM

Yes, I have completely given up on Exchange so that effected the result. I still find myself using Entourage every once and a while to check on other people's schedule, but other than that there is little use.

I find Gmail much faster, and google calendar more intuitive (the "quick add" feature is worth it alone since I can SMS to it).

However, unlike your experiment I was not comparing to Windows Vista, only XP. Perhaps that would have altered things.

Posted by: Nabeel Hyatt | December 06, 2006 at 09:39 AM

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