Mac OS X

I bought my wife one of the new MacBooks for X-Mas. She had been complaining about the performance of Vista on her (pretty) old Sony Vaio laptop. After playing with it for about a day, I'll stick to PC myself. What Apple has done really well is focus on the "fit & finish" and design elements of the OS. All the transitions and animations make it a really polished product. However, I found lots of things unintuitive and many of the complaints about PC (specifically Vista) I experienced with Mac OS X 10.5.

First, I tried to connect the MacBook to my brother's Wifi WEP (I told him to switch to WPA2) network. Perhaps I'm just too used to the Windows GUI, but trying to troubleshoot the network problem proved impossible. I ended up using Google and after looking at half a dozen websites, it turns out that Airport drivers don't support "Default Transmit Index" that isn't set to 1. If you set it to 2, 3, or 4, the Mac doesn't support it. The only workaround is to set the Wifi router to use 1, but that would mean my brother would have to change all his Wifi clients to use 1, so instead I ended up using ethernet.

After internet was working, I checked for software updates and had to go through at least 4 restarts before there were no more updates available.

After all updates were applied, I then tried to add an account for Airi. In the Accounts UI, it was just not obvious how to add a new user. Eventually, I clicked on the "+" button and that turned out to be the right button, however, because it was detached from the control that listed the users (and apparently Apple doesn't believe in ToolTips), it wasn't obvious that was the way to do it.

Finally, I've seen lots of complaints about UAC (User Access Control) in Vista. And Mac isn't much different, but it IS better. I don't get as many prompts (although I haven't played with it that much) and one thing I liked is the option to not be prompted again for giving access to a specific process/application.

Overall, I think the MacBook is a nice polished product, but I've been using the Win7 Beta and will be sticking to PC for now.