Musing on the Mac...

Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 10, 2017 at 09:12 AM

I’ve just finished translating a very large presentation in Keynote, over 110 slides, full of graphics, videos etc.

At a certain stage in the process, this involved putting the German original up alongside the English translation so I could compare the two easily.

I’m glad to say that at all times, Keynote operated with exemplary stability and smoothness.

This is very much at odds with my experiences in Microsoft Office (on Mac): if I was to try the same thing with PowerPoint or, gods help us, Word, they would both have been stuttering like anything, and probably collapsing completely at unexpected moments.

That’s despite the fact that I’m working on a 2015 MacBook Pro with the usual 16GB of RAM.

Why do I say this? I suppose it’s to highlight a certain difference in philosophy. While there is no shortage of people willing to slang off Apple, there’s a whole lot of stuff they just quietly get right. Things like being able to reply to telephone calls on your iPad, iPod or MacBook, for example. Things like an operating system that just works, reducing the amount of troubleshooting I have to do for colleagues by more than - at a rough estimate - 80%.

Whereas Windows seems to take two steps back for every big step forward. I keep Windows machines, just so I can stay up to date with what’s going on. And I’m genuinely appalled at how intrusive and over-complicated they have become - even Windows 10, which I liked when it first appeared (anything was better than the grisly Windows 8). I’ve just been talking to a non-techie colleague who’s spent some six hours trying to uninstall all the dependencies on OneDrive he (rather rashly) installed when he first got his new Windows laptop; he still hasn’t finished, he’s unbelievably frustrated, and simply doesn’t understand many of the choices Microsoft ask him to make.

Generalising from the particular is always rash. But my main reason for switching our business over to Mac was Windows 8, after asking myself the very simple question: could I easily train people to use this software? Although I’m what could be described as a “power user” of Windows, most users are not. And the answer was “no”.

And of course some of the truly great CRIMPing software exists on Mac and not on Windows (with the exception of ConnectedText, alas). But that’s a secondary consideration. Honest.

Cheers,
Bill