Switching to Macs

My first personal computer was an Apple II. Actually, if a personal computer is defined as a computer that is used by one person, my first PC was an HP 2114A which the designer, Bill Cargile, left on what became my bench when I went to work for HP. I dug up a Model 33 ASR Teletype, attached a plotter, and claimed it. But the Apple II was my first of what most folks call personal computers.

I liked that machine. I especially liked the Logo programming language, and I taught my kids programming using it. I used it for spreadsheets, word processing, and playing games. Then the IBM PC came along, and I switched to it, first with PC-DOS. A flirtation with various windowing operating systems followed, until Microsoft finally produced a semi-stable version of Windows.

Then I got interested in doing photography on computers. By that time, the late 1980s, the Mac was becoming the go-to system for photographers and graphics artists, so I got a Quadra 9000 and used it for photography with Photoshop, keeping the PCs for other work. Later I got one of the pastel Mac towers and used it to drive my Imacon Flextight scanner and Fuji Pictrography printer.

After the conversion to System X, I got an Apple laptop and used it for the programs I wanted to use that didn’t run on the PC, like Brian Griffith’s Iridient Developer.

Nothing much changed for 10 or 15 years. Then my wife bought a Mac, and started asking me questions I couldn’t answer. When the M4 MacBook Pros came out last fall, I bought one and was favorably impressed by a combination of high speed and low power that I hadn’t found in the Wintel world. I also discovered that MacOS had come a long way in terms of flexibility. Being an iPhone and IPad user made the transition easier.

I bought two Mac Studios, a 192 GB M2 Ultra and a 512 GB M3 Ultra, and started to see if I could replace my big Dell workstation. It looked like they were more than capable of doing the job, and I haven’t powered up the Dell for more than three months.

The big reason for the switch was to take advantage of the power/performance advantage of the ARM-based RISC architecture in the M-series Macs as opposed to the CISC 8086-derived Intel architecture. The Apple Studio machines are much smaller than the Dell workstations that I had been using. This is partially due to the lower power dissipation, but also a result of moving most of the SSD’s outside the box and connecting them with Thunderbolt. The split storage design is not as fast as the PCIe-based SSD arrays that I used in my Dell workstation, but the Apple Thunderbolt implementation is much more stable and robust than any Wintel Thunderbolt storage solution that I’d tried. Things will improve when there are large Thunderbolt 5 DAS boxes, but I don’t know of any right now.

When I first started to use Macs, I thought that they had embraced simplicity too much, making things easier for neophytes, but creating problems for sophisticated users. The one-button mouse is an example. Elimination of the right-delete, page up, page down, home, and end keys was another. Hiding the file extensions from the users and making them use an unforgiving program like ResEdit to change what app opened what file was a third. That’s pretty much all gone now. I don’t like the Apple spongy keyboards, but I’m now using third party keyboards that have all the keys I want, and the OS does a fine job of recognizing them. It’s easy to map the keys the way you want to in Settings; much easier than in Windows, where you have to edit the registry or install an app to do that.

When I started using Windows, it was a standalone OS. Over time, more and more networking was included, but it didn’t need a network for basic operation. That’s gradually changed. Now it’s not easy to set up a new Windows machine without a Microsoft account, and you must jump through hoops to get it to not use OneDrive. And then there are the ads. I really hate those, and there seem to be more and more of them all the time. Add in some of the botched OS updates, and I wasn’t a happy user.

MacOS shares the attachment to the vendor mothership issue, but at least it’s not a step back in that regard. As an iPhone and iPad user, I was familiar with most of the capabilities of my Apple account, and that made the transition easier. There were some surprises, and they were mostly positive. I didn’t expect to be able to unlock my Macs with my Apple watch or use my iPad as an auxiliary screen. I was pleased to see Apple messages on my Macs, and it’s great to be able to compose messages with a real keyboard.

Sometimes, the Apple device and OS integration is too clever for its own good. A couple of weeks ago, I started losing my mouse pointer on one of my Macs. It took me a while to figure out that, in addition to the two displays I had physically connected to the computer, it had decided to add one of the screens on another Mac in the same room. Since I didn’t know that the mouse pointer was on that screen, I couldn’t find it.

Most all the apps I was using on the Wintel machines had MacOS versions, and most of those versions supported the M-series instruction set architecture natively. I did have to install Rosetta for a few apps.

I have never heard the fans on the Mac Studios, although some people have complained that they are noisy. I heard the fans on my Dell workstation every time I asked the computer to do any big job. The Mac Studios heat my office less.

There are some things about MacOS that don’t give me joy. I don’t like the floating menu bar at the top of the screen. I don’t like the Finder very much. But those are things I can live with. I’m in no hurry to go back.