OK, so this wasn’t actually my Mac - I was visiting the office of one of my parents. But this was one of my earliest experiences with a Mac, and I remember enjoying it a great deal. I think I probably mostly used the Paint function, which appealed to my sensibilities at the time. I was also into BASIC programming for a while around the same time, creating short programs…

At any rate, it had been quite a while since I’d used a Mac since I purchased a little-used Mac Mini a couple of years ago and then a MacBook a few months ago…

I experienced two quite different sides of Apple today - the Steve Jobs keynote, and a personal experience with my troublesome MacBook.

The keynote was everything you would expect it to be - well choreographed, lots of big announcements, the best left for last and so on. Even despite all the rumors, there were still some surprises in there, and the crowd seemed genuinely appreciative of the new applications which were demoed, even though those demos did seem to go on a bit long. The iPhone 3G is, like its predecessor, a phenomenal device, and when I hear people say it doesn’t do anything differently or better than other phones out there, I just find myself wondering if they’ve ever actually seen one up close and played with it. The thing is in a league of its own for me, in terms of design, user interface, browsing experience, email, applications and so on. The only things preventing me from getting one previously were speed, price, and the sense that a better version would probably turn up soon. Come 11 July, I’ll be first in line at my local AT&T store.

On the other hand, my personal experience with Apple over the last few months has been wretched. My hard drive failed a few weeks ago, and the process of getting it fixed was tedious to say the least. I had to make an appointment for technical support at my local store, they determined the hard drive had failed, but wanted to charge me to copy my files off it. So I declined, did it myself back at home, but then had to make another appointment to take it back in. Picked it up a few days later only to discover when I got home that they had forgotten to install iLife on it. Took it back again, etc. Finally got it home, reinstalled everything, moved images, music etc. back onto it, finally had everything back the way I like it, and then today had the same early symptoms as last time pop up again. The thing no longer starts under Mac OS X, only Vista.

So I called technical support, since my local store had no technical support slots left today, and spent a total of 2 hours or more on the phone with various different people trying to convince them that simply repeating the process I went through last time wasn’t going to reassure me that this wasn’t going to happen again. Their standard policy is that they will fix a device 3 times before allowing you to receive a replacement, even if it’s a hard-drive failure as it has been twice now for me. It wasn’t until I had kept some poor customer service person on the phone for a good 45 minutes repeating over and over again that the solution she was proposing was unacceptable that she finally transferred me to someone with more clout who was willing to concede that giving me a new machine was the right thing to do.

The contrast between these two experiences - the real excitement associated with a new product launch from Apple, and the sheer frustration involved with being a customer when a product goes wrong - almost couldn’t be greater. Is this the same company? Yes. But does their customer service match the high expectations they create through their carefully choreographed keynotes, flawless demos and clever advertising at the expense of the hapless PC? I’m not so sure.

I bought a MacBook a week and a half ago and have been playing with it since with a view to making it my main work computer. Since we normally run Windows XP and Microsoft Office, this meant I needed to have some form of access to those Office applications. I already own a copy of Microsoft Office and have found that the Mac versions of the Office applications can be problematic in some cases, including the fact that Entourage is an imperfect substitute for Outlook, so I decided to go the route of adding a Windows OS to the MacBook instead. I read up about the two main virtualisation options - Fusion (from VMware) and Parallels, and eventually decided to go with Fusion, though by all accounts the two are pretty similar in terms of performance and functionality. I also purchased a copy of Vista Home Premium - I was going to have to buy some version of Windows anyway and I had been curious to try out Vista after all the criticism of it since its launch.

So I’ve now been running Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard side by side for a few days, and have a good way to compare the two. Vista’s performance has been impaired by the fact that I’ve been running it on a virtual machine instead of as a booting OS, so the “Aero” graphics features of Vista have been missing in action because Fusion doesn’t allow the Vista virtual machine full access to my graphics capabilities. In addition, I’ve had network connectivity issues and also a relatively recent problem with windows minimising and maximising at random while I’m working in them.These things aside, Vista hasn’t been that bad. The constant security nagging is easily my biggest beef (you click on an application or a component of Control Panel and are asked whether you want to continue, every time - didn’t I just say that’s what I wanted to do?), as well as being told periodically that I need permission (what permission? from whom? and how the heck do I get it?) to move a file from point A to point B on the hard drive, within the Windows environment.

These are serious flaws, and from what I can tell (see below) they’re not solvable, even outside the Fusion environment. There are some changes from XP and other previous editions in terms of naming (the word “My” is dropped from Documents, Videos, Music, Downloads etc.), structure (the Start Menu is now kept in place rather than expanding to the right as you drill down into the folder structure) and functionality (Vista has built-in Contacts, Calendar and Mail applications). So there’s the usual learning curve that you have with a new OS, but none of these things is either dramatically difficult to get to grips with or dramatically more useful than the old way of doing things. You get the sense that Microsoft has learned from Apple that new releases need new cool stuff, but they’ve tinkered at the edges with things that don’t really matter instead of really making the experience truly better.

The new Mac OS, on the other hand, feels like an incremental improvement, but a real one in certain ways, over Tiger. The search function is better, the whole Time Machine concept is a good one, although I don’t have a separate hard drive large enough to test it, the iLife applications are better than in the previous iteration, and overall it feels like the OS has moved forward in small but measurable ways. The whole option of running two operating systems on the same machine is, of course, a huge bonus too, and includes the built-in Boot Camp option of running either OS from bootup as well as the Fusion and Parallels paid-for virtualisation options.

Today, I installed Vista again, this time using Boot Camp. I had been frustrated with the limitations on Vista’s new features imposed by running it in the Fusion environment, but also by the nagging network connectivity and other problems I was experiencing. I now have the full functionality of Vista (Aero included) in the Boot Camp version, and will likely delete the original Fusion virtualisation and replace it with a virtualisation of the Boot Camp version (which will still be crippled but will work well enough for the most part when I don’t want to go Windows-only).

It’s been an interesting exercise in comparing and contrasting the Windows and Apple experiences. Apple really seems to have improved things, while Microsoft seems merely to have changed things, including in some cases for the worse, although mostly in an indifferent direction. However, the mere fact that I’m virtually forced still to use Windows and Microsoft applications because they are the standard at work is the biggest reason why Microsoft survives and thrives despite all this. It works well enough and, for now at least, it’s still dominant.