The whole Ipod experience (which has been very pleasant) got me interested in trying out an Apple, so I opted to borrow the
work iBook for a few days, just to try things out. After having used it about 33% of the time for about a week now, I can pretty definitively say I won't be buying an Apple any time soon.
Why, you ask? I was actually expecting the user interface to be extremely intuitive (the iTunes interface definitely is), but for someone who has used Linux and Windows for years, the overall UI of Mac OS X just is too different. For starters, I dislike the Apple's notion of an "application". It's sort of hard to explain if you've never played around with OS X, but Apple apps are either "open" or "closed", and all windows from one open app are sort of grouped together behind the scenes. For example, I can close all of the Firefox windows, but the Firefox application can still remain open. On Windows and Linux, when I close the last Firefox window, Firefox the application closes. To me, this makes way more sense, but then again I am coming from years of Windows and Linux use.
Other things I didn't much care for:
When you click the Firefox or Safari icon in the dock for the first time, the app is started and a new window is opened. After that, clicking on the Firefox or Safari application in the dock only brings the respective application to the front. It doesn't spawn a new browser window, as would happen if you clicked a Firefox or IE icon under Windows. Why do you have to be aware of an application's behind-the-scenes "open" or "closed" state in order to predict what will happen when you click its icon? And why do I have to go into a menu or use a key combination to create a new browser window?
The laptop trackpad lacks a right mouse button. This doesn't seem bad at first, but click-and-hold and/or control-click gets extremely annoying after a while, especially when dealing with cross-platform software like Mozilla. Additionally, the trackpad just /feels/ wrong. It's hard to aim very exactly, and I find myself constantly correcting my mouse movements in a way I never have to on my laptop...though I am willing to admit that this might just be a learning curve.
I had also expected X11 software to "just work", but it turns out that X11 software really doesn't just work at all. Since X11 software doesn't follow the "persistant application" model described above, there's no way for X11 apps to integrate with Apple-isms like the dock (though you can minimize X11 apps to the dock with some success). So if you fire up an X11 app like Gaim, it won't appear in the dock...which is counterintuitive, since native Mac OS X applications
do appear in the dock when run. All of your X11 apps are basically stored under the "X Server" dock entry. Also, X11 apps don't use Carbon, so they "break the UI rules" by doing things like rendering menus in their windows instead of at the top of the screen.
I understand why Apple puts the menu bar at the top of the screen...because it's easier to aim and hit a menu bar up there than it is to aim and hit a menu bar in a window. The underlying assumption made here is that at any given point, I am working in one and only one open application (since only one menu bar can be shown). But this just isn't true! Especially with multi-monitor setups like I have at work, I am frequently using several applications at once. I have open a calendaring app, mail app, IM app, terminal, browser windows, etc. I frequently want to move quickly between these apps, and I
don't want to have to use something like Expose, which--though it's pretty--is slower than dealing with the task bar.
Anyway, here's my conclusion: at the end of the day, Mac OS X is pretty to look at and much more stable than Windows. It's simpler in some respects (device configuration is notably more hassle-free than Windows), but it's also more complex (right mouse clicking, switching applications) than Windows. As much as I hate to admit it, Windows XP Pro on decently good hardware (like my Thinkpad) is pretty much the apex of quick, inexpensive, easy to use, mobile computing at the moment, at least for most of us.
There are things that the Apple can do better, and I like the fact that it's stable and powered by UNIX, but if it can't let me work quickly and efficiently, then I'll settle for something that does let me work quickly and efficiently but that is slightly less stable and not powered by UNIX. Plus, I can always use Linux, which from my standpoint has all of the
good UI of Windows (and Mac OS X, too) with little or none of the bad UI...except for system configuration, which OSS developers are still working the kinks out of.