It's been over a year since I migrated to X from Linux (Slackware, for the curious), I would say that it's been one of the best decisions I've made.
Initially the decision was pushed by a failing PC, I'd had enough of bad hardware, and configuration headaches, and decided that the time was ripe to buy a whole machine, rather than continue replacing bits that were broken, or too slow. I figured that Linux would still run on it, even if X turned out to be horrible. Fortunately, it wasn't. The install process was simple, just a case of selecting which components you wanted to install and setting up the hard drive, though for many users it would be possible to avoid those steps and go with the defaults, I needed a custom
setup so I could install Linux as well. After that the process could be left to itself, up until the end where it requires some details to complete the setup. Initially, I was taken aback by the look of it, it has the air of something that has been thought through carefully, not just the big things, but all the little touches, like shadows and transparency. After drooling for a while, I set about configuring things, again I was surprised. I'd had some experience setting up previous versions of MacOS on elderly Macs, so I knew it wasn't particularly hard, but Apple have surpassed themselves with their System Preferences application, everything is laid out nicely, and within easy reach, it's possible to get things as you like them in a matter of minutes, without any rebooting for settings to take effect, or other such obstructions. Moving onto the Unix side of things, it quickly became apparent that it was there without being in your face. Up until the point that you open a terminal window the machine is every bit a Mac, but with the terminal running, you have everything that Unix users take for granted. Long time Mac users can take heart in the fact that you can use the system without ever touching the terminal, it's just a nice extra feature for the geekier among us. Apple's email application is wonderful, it's not very flashy, but it does exactly what a mail program should do, without trying to be everything else at the same time. The same applies to the other included programs, they all work well without carrying unnecessary weight, and with nice clean interfaces. Adding hardware is a pleasant experience, provided you buy hardware that is supported by OS X, there should be no problems getting it working, I added a second graphics card, and when the machine had finished booting, I had dual display, without having to do any configuration or driver installation, all I had to do was set the display mode and position the screens. with 10.1 I had one or two quibbles, viewing the contents of directories could be incredibly slow if you chose to sort files by anything other than name, and the only available X11 implementations were insufferably slow, making using any graphical Unix application painful. 10.2 however has fixed those problems, along with making the system generally more responsive, and improving boot times. Apples X server is very fast, and their browser, Safari, is superior to IE in most respects. Stability hasn't been an issue, I've had a few crashes, but these seem to have been teething troubles. The system also comes with a disk containing the Developer tools, not only compilers and libraries, but also a very nice development environment (Project Builder), and some first class documentation, giving a very cost effective route into developing MacOS applications. I feel slightly guilty for rating the Instructions/Help as poor, the Unix side is well documented through the man pages, though there is little additional material, and as mentioned the developer documentation is excellent. The problem lies with the online help, it is, to put it bluntly, useless. I find that if I need information about some part of the system, it's more fruitful to hit the web, the information is usually easy to find on the various user-contributed OS X sites, or even on Apple's own pages. Fortunately, this isn't too much of an issue as help is rarely needed.
So overall, an excellently usable, stable, and nice looking system.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
(+) Superb screen, superior speakers, huge capacity, multiplicity of functions, brilliant photo suite (-) A new 'language' to learn and company support not as good as one would expect.
(+) Faster, good networking with other Windows machine, so far it has not crashed. (-) price, best to do a fresh install which will involve backup & restore of information
A nicely written op! Well done. Can I just say one thing? You may want to split it up with paragraphs, to make it a little easier on the eye. Georgina :)
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