If You Write, Get a Mac!
Okay, at the risk of losing some of you, I have to once again say that if you’re writing — doing any kind of writing — you need to be working with a Mac. End of discussion.
Cost an issue? I always used to tell people that if it costs a little more to get a machine that just works, then it’s worth it. But the reality is that even some years ago Apple was comparable to many pcs when one considered how much the pc user would have to add to her machine to make it comparable to the Mac. And in fact in the past 18 months there have been numerous articles about the many Mac models that are less expensive than many pcs with the same specs. A number of articles can be Googled that compare Dell’s prices for tower pcs, for example, with MacPro towers: they find very often that the Macs come out cheaper. (In some cases, hundreds of dollars cheaper!)
But even putting the cost issues aside, think about what a writer can do with the Leopard operating system:
- Edit and annotate pdfs from Preview (that’s right, no more need to pay Adobe a small fortune in order to obtain a version of Acrobat that can write to pdfs);
- Juggle several screens at once (particularly important for those of us whose laptop is our only computer), quickly and seamlessly, using Spaces;
- Place folders that normally clutter the desktop in the Dock, one of the most wonderful of inventions, ever;
- Work with Word documents without owning Word through the new TextEdit … and, yes, it exports as a Word doc;
(There’s also a fabulous new personal-use database program available called Bento, though I can’t comment on it, as I’m already pretty much married to the combination of DEVONThink Pro and my ScanSnap document scanner. Let’s hear it for the nearly paperless office!)
All this to say that if you haven’t looked at a Mac lately, you might want to consider it now. You can buy refurbished models at the online Apple Store, and old Macs retain their value to an amazing degree. I upgrade every two years or so by buying a new Mac and selling my old one on eBay … and it rarely costs me more than a few hundred dollars. Seriously. It’s not just a computer, it’s a decent investment. Try doing that with a pc!
I’m not a programmer, and don’t want to have to feel like one. I want my computer to be invisible, intuitive, a non-issue. It happens with a Mac. It just works.
And that pretty much puts me … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Tools, Technology on May 9th, 2008