It's a Mac World After All

When my brother went to college, it was a time when Macs were still rather rare (always a treat to see someone else using one) and PCs were common. Nowadays, it's Macs that are the highly dominant ones (or at least iPads) with PCs much rarer, only seen by mostly the gaming/Linux-using guys.

But is it worth it? What do Macs have nowadays that Windows cannot do? Sure, it's still a better operating system, but Lion has all sorts of annoying features that Windows used to pride itself on, and frankly people use so few applications (between an Internet browser and Word) that it's practically irrelevant. The software library available for Mac without emulators has grown smaller than before, and let's face it--the "stability" gap has closed dramatically, as is "user friendliness", but other things like "customizability" have gone by the wayside.

Mac gaming isn't any better: while there are far more games for much cheaper (remember in the days when the PC ports would drop in price while the Mac ports stayed high?) and more stable (Aspyr's ports were more often than not pretty bad), these ports of today are simply PC games in a wrapper that translates the Windows API calls into Mac calls, which degrades performance.

So why do I use a Mac? Simple: it's because I live in the past. I'm still using Snow Leopard. I'd never upgrade to Lion unless major things were done to it (interface changes, Rosetta compatibility) which will never happen because it's hard-coded in, and Apple's current trend is to try to create a fully uniformed system with a closed application environment. This, coupled with the whole "more popular" thing, is making Apple and the Mac more and more like the "evil IBM compatibles" it was suppose to be against.

I'm not against Apple because "it's popular, therefore it sucks", I'm just thinking that it's sad that as it became worse (at least in my opinion) it became mainstream. For the near future, I'll keep using my Mac. For the future after that, I'm probably going to end up joining the legion of Linux nerds, I'm afraid.