As I’ve pointed out before, I’ve been a PC guy most of my life and have only been using Macs for the last two years. The biggest takeaway for me has been that Microsoft and Apple are really pretty even: they both pose as poster children for anti-competitive practices, generally favor proprietary code over open source, and make very questionable ethics calls.

Microsoft has been living with the reputation of a big bad corporation for over a decade now. But in the last year or so, there has been a subtle but significant shift in the public opinion, for the better. I can actually pin-point exactly when: it’s since Bill Gates has stepped down. Although Slashdot still illustrates all Microsoft news with the now famous Borg avatar of Bill, the tech media seems to have softened its perception of him. People speak of him with some nostalgia now, and he’s often portrayed as some sort of wise elder spokesman for technology. A lot of that may be due to Ballmer being very unpopular and Gates therefore shining by contrast, but I think that there is something deeper going on here. Read the rest of this entry »
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I often find myself in the situation where there are too many simultaneous data transfers going on over my Wi-Fi at home: I’ll be watching a TV show on my Apple TV (which streams from the Drobo, see this post for details), transferring media to the Drobo, doing a large svn or git checkout, all of this while Time Machine is wirelessly backing up the Mac.

At this point I’ll often decide to stop the ongoing backup, knowing it will start again an hour later when there is less going on. So far so good. What’s less good is that when Time Machine is doing a very large backup, say 20 gigs, I know I will need to stop it every hour for a while and I’ll sometimes disable it with the intent of re-enabling it once all of the data transfers are done. Read the rest of this entry »
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I hate to be blogging about Apple again, but it has been quite ubiquitous of late and given that I own an iPhone, an Apple TV, a Mac Mini and a MacBook Pro, I cannot help caring.

From a PR standpoint, the last few months have been mixed at best for Apple (more on that later), and yet from a financial standpoint it has been pretty much blowing right through this recession, announcing just last month the best non-holiday quarter in the company’s history. What’s going on here?

I grew up very much a PC guy. My first computer, in 1994, was a 75MHz Pentium I with 8 megs of ram and a 500 MB hard drive running Dos and Windows 3.11. I was 14, it was by far the coolest thing I’d ever owned, and the internet was just getting started. Sometimes when I’d go visit a school buddy of mine, I’d take a peek at his dad’s Apple PowerPC which, he liked to remind me, was much more expensive and cooler than my PC. It also wasn’t compatible with mine. It never would be. Apple actually cultivated that difference, it thrived on it: remember ‘think different?’

From that point until about a year and a half ago, I discarded Macs as over-priced, over-engineered rounded cubes without a delete key or a right-click button, designed by and for intellectual snobs.

Read the rest of this entry »

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