Long post gets long response.
Hi,
I really am struggling to understand why there is so much emotion around having a Mac and why Windows is hated by the Mac community so much [...] The argument that Windows is not stable and so prone to viruses is very old [...] I run Windows on several servers, desktops and laptops. It runs great on everything I own. No Issue. EVER.
I don't think it's an emotional thing. I love my Mac, but I also love my Win8 PC. Those tiles just make me feel calm and peaceful. Some mac users go overboard, but so do some windows zealots. I think the core factor upon which the Mac builds its popularity, is because it's designed in a way that caters to human use, as opposed to catering to a bulleted list of features. E.g. Windows 7 (Vista?) offered vastly improved security compared to its predecessors, but they did it by blitzing you with security request popups. That may be an effective way to implement a feature, but it doesn't make the OS a joy to use.
I find the Mac 10.1 (500 GB HD, Mountain Lion) 4GB RAM pretty slow. [...] In contrast, I have a virtually identical spec Windows PC - runs like a dream.
[Skeuomorphic apps are dumb].
I REALLY CANNOT get used to this ridiculous touchy mousy thingy. [...]
I will agree that Windows performance on identically specced machines seems punchier, but I feel the Mac's performance tends to be "smoothed" out a bit. I sometimes see tearing when moving windows in Windows. I never see that on a Mac. I think your disdainful take on skeuomorphic apps (like Calendar) is very subjective. Of course, you would find some strong allies at Apple who share your opinion (like head designer Jony Ive), so I suspect this will disappear soon. That said, I kind of like them. I'll be sad to see them go. I don't think skeuomorphism is there to help stupid people, it's to help differentiate visually. When I have a bunch of windows open and they are all following identical design guildlines, it all just blurs into a visual mess of near-identical look & feel. If the apps each have individual skeuomorphic themes, it's easier to pick them out visually. Of course this only holds true if each app has its own skeuomorphic personality. If _everything_ is brushed metal or leather & parchment, then there's no advantage, and I would agree that's kind of silly.
I really am struggling to find anything at all you can do on a Mac that you can't do equally well (or better) on Windows. [...] I personally think ITunes is one of the worst-designed pieces of professional software ever. It's JUST AWFUL.
* It's a lot easier to connect to non-public wifi access points on the Mac. Just click the icon in the toolbar and pick "other network" and type its name. On Windows, you have to go through several dialogs to add a "known network".
* Setting up international input settings is a lot easier on Mac. I was trying to set up pinyin style input for traditional chinese for a friend's aunt, and could not figure it out. There were several chinese input methods, sure, but I couldn't figure out the right combination--although I know it's possible because I've seen it elsewhere.. Plus, the mac does it easily.
* expose is very nice on the mac. You can use it in mid-drag during drag & drop operations in order to, say, drag something from the desktop to an open window that was right on top of what you wanted to drag into it. I haven't occasioned to need to do that in win8 yet, but in win7 and earlier it wasn't practical without add-ons. In fact I don't think I figured out how to do it with add-ons, either. Since the zoomed out windows were more of a layer with representations of the windows (instead of shrunken versions of the windows themselves), they weren't reliably compatible with drag & drop.
* os x comes with apache & many other LAMP stack open source tools out of the box. If you're a web developer working in, say, PHP or Python, Mac is ready to go without any additional downloads. Windows requires you to pick a windowsy flavor of those tools and install it.
* icloud connectivity works well on the mac. Back to my Mac is particularly nice when you are dealing with computers on remote networks (e.g. home to work).
It makes me laugh every time I see a feature in the Mac that Apple has put an "i" in front of, or give it a fancy name, to claim it's theirs. "Expose" - it's a desktop manager. Brilliant. "Mission Control" - it's a menu with programs in it. Brilliant. "Time Machine" - previous versions of files. Brilliant.
Am I missing something, or does this sound like the Marketing Department gets the bulk of the budget at Apple?
It sounds like you're distilling capabilities into bullet points, and losing a lot of substance when you do so. Yeah, they both have desktop managers, just like how a Honda Civic and a Lexus LS both have speedometers and adjustable seats. Expose offers much more functionality out of the box for window management than win7, yet it retains a simplicity of use that bogs down many third party add-ons. Many windows features are like this, burying features behind many dialog boxes.
The usefulness of many apps is in their design. Time machine is a lot easier to use than, say, SuperDuper (another fairly nice mac app). SuperDuper may have more features, but if you just want a simple backup plus the ability to recover stuff you accidentally trash, I haven't seen a simpler way than Time Machine. TM makes it very clear what you're doing.
[...] It doesn't even have a built-in software uninstaller! (e.g. Windows Add/Remove programs) That's not particularly advanced, is it?
I hear in Mountain Lion one of the "key features" is that you can now have full-screen apps. Windows has had that since, well I can't remember how long ago it's that long ago.
And apparently in Mountain Lion, another "key feature" is the advanced App Store. I bet it is. More $$$.
For most apps, you don't need an uninstaller. Just drag the app to the trash. That's the advised method of app deletion. Apps that do need one (e.g. VMware) come with one. One shouldn't ask "Why doesn't Mac have an uninstaller?", one should ask: "Why does Windows need a separate app deleter? Why can't you just delete the app?" It's unnecessary yet mandatory redundancy with no benefit.
As for full screen, Mac has had "full screen" apps forever also. All mac games have always gone full screen. The new "full screen" initiative is that Apple is adding UI modes to existing, windowed apps that optimizes them for full screen use as the only active app. E.g. on a projector or TV. Lots of windowed apps expect to be used in a windowed environment (i.e. they expect you can drag&drop things into them, or they don't expect to be run at mega-big resolutions), and when you full screen them, they work but look like crap. Apple's fullscreen apps are designed to look good and operate well at full screen.
IMO, I don't know if they are really succeeding at this task. I hardly ever use full screen mode. I never use it in Windows either. I like having 2+ apps onscreen at once. Could just be me.
The store's "advanced feature" is sandboxing and curation. Apple realizes that as it becomes more popular, it will be a higher priority virus & malware target, so instead of being "whatever" about it, they're being proactive. For power users, nobody cares about the app store. But for casual users, this is good. And remember, plenty of apps in the app store are free, so it's not like this is solely a money grab.
What I particularly dislike is Apple's very aggressive and domineering stance when it comes to things like the AppStore and having open protocols, etc. Everything is closed - everything goes through Apple. This used to be one of the biggest criticisms of Microsoft - but they have changed SO MUCH in the last few years. They are really embracing open source technologies. Their flagship development framework is totally open source, for example.
Disagree. Microsoft's app store for win8 seems just as "bad". And you're talking about your iMac, so please stay on topic. You can download apps from anywhere or install them from any typical computer medium. Apple's support of open protocols has been pretty stellar in my experience. OS X includes Apache, VNC, SSH etc.. out of the box. Windows includes windows-proprietary equivalents. Ignoring existing standards and open-sourcing your own stuff doesn't really count as supporting open protocols, IMO.
On the contrary, Apple seem to be adopting the opposite approach with the AppStore, for example. I know I'm talking about the iOS specifically here, but they have single-handedly killed off Flash by not allowing it in to iOS. You may argue that's a good thing - but what right did they have for doing that?
So first you attack Apple for not supporting open standards, and now you poo-poo them for not embracing a proprietary web technology? It seems like you just don't like anything they do. Are you sure you're not flamebaiting? Flash was and continues to be extremely ill-suited to mobile phones. Even if you ignore the battery life and cpu expense that Apple frequently cited, many flash plugins required a keyboard and/or mouse-hover functionality, neither of which (particularly the mouse hover) can be done well on a touchscreen.
Also, Flash was perfectly welcome to continue to exist. If it was really that awesome, Adobe would have stood by it, and it would have done well. Apple did not have the authority or the power to kill it. As we all know there are more android phones out there anyway. If Adobe thought it was worth the time and expense, it'd still exist. It was an ill-concieved bid for power by Adobe, and they were hoping Apple would expend time and money on their behalf to get it to work. Apple simply didn't want to roll uphill for something that served nobody's purpose but Adobe's.
Are you saying you wish Flash supplanted HTML5? Because the two are essentially at odds, inasmuch as Flash could do everything and more that open-standards like HTML5 are trying to achieve in a more open way.
Anyway, this was supposed to be about my iMac, so let's get back to that.
My *honest* opinion is this:
The iMac looks cool. I mean it really does. It's gorgeous - a work of art.
But isn't that it? Is there more function behind the form, that I'm just not seeing?
Like I said at the start, I WANT to love my iMac - that's where all the apparently cool kids are these days. But I JUST DON'T GET IT.
So, please convince me. What is it I'm missing?
Thanks.
No need to convince you. It's just a computer. If you want a Windows machine, buy a copy of Windows, use Boot camp, and then enjoy a really good-looking windows machine.
Objectively speaking, I'd say OS X is far better at unix/linux integration. Most of my development is on the web, and most of my hosts are unix, so OS X is a _much_ better fit for working with these machines. If I was using windows, it'd be harder to maintain consistency moving stuff between my home and work environments.
Ultimately, they are both capable OS's. I think most of the OS X advantage is in the little things. I can only mention examples, and they may mean little to you, at least at first blush.
For example, I like having a single menubar up top, rather than wasting real-estate in each app for individual menu bars, when I can only click on one of them at a time anyway.
I hate the Windows control panel. It's just a mess. Even when I know what I'm looking for it's hard to find stuff in it. Combine that with the fact that despite the fact it has a million icons, half the stuff you expect to find in there is under Administrator Tools and Computer Management. System Prefs is much cleaner.
*I* find it far simpler to make my computer into a hotspot. Just Systemprefs->sharing->"share internet" Done.
No windows key = more functionality for keyboard shortcuts + no accidental hitting of the windows key which usually removes focus from the window I'm in and messes me up. I hate when I bump the windows key when doing copy/paste work into documents or during games.
I like how, when in a find dialog box (and NOT using spotlight), you can just keying the name of the icon you're after (more than just the first letter, as long as you do it fast enough) and it will land on the icon that matches what you typed.
And speaking of Spotlight, it seems to be faster and more effective than windows search, in my experience.
Having a "cmd-H" and "alt-cmd-H" to hide current or other windows functionality is superior to a stretch-to-fullscreen icon (which never looks good anyway), IMO.
A lot of the stuff you poo-poo'ed earlier, like expose and spaces, work more fluidly on the mac. Since everything in OS X is basically a 3D object, using these functions just "zooms out", as if in a game. The zooming happens very fast and you can manipulate things in predictable ways since they have the same properties. In Windows, when you do this (usually via a third party app since many of these features aren't built-in) the UI for interacting with the zoomed objects is less consistent. You can't always drag and drop where you'd expect. Performance in these windows equivalents can be a bit hit or miss. Expose is designed to be relied upon as a workhorse key(s). If it's sluggish at all, you won't want to use it.
also, you can hit shift- while hitting an expose key, and that will make things unnecessarily slow. It's just silly, but fun when you're bored.
There's really nothing to "get". If you're a windows guru, and you like windows, I'd say that makes you biased in the the way that a skilled person prefers to use his skills. Just as a skiier who really enjoys skiing isn't necessarily going to be impressed by trying out snowboarding, and spending most of the day impacting their tailbones and wiping snow off their butts. To get the full experience, you're going to have to "unlearn" (temporarily) what you know, and learn a new thing. There are many direct equivalents between the two OS's, but to a certain extent, they have different ways of working, and if you try to carry yourself expecting to find 1:1 equivalents for everything you need, you're going to fail in the same way that directly translating chinese into english tends to fail.
My history with Macs and Windows is even longer than yours and I've watched both companies learn from each other as the years have gone by. 
