Here’s an extended list of Mac vs PC commercials. If your IT staff proves resistant to blatant advertising tricks you’ll have to dig deeper, please read on.

The story behind the post

At work I’ve received a series of hand me downs after my windows xp system croaked a couple of years ago. Yeah I know what you may be thinking, Windows XP? If there’s one thing my company can’t be accused of, it’s upgrading too often.

My first instinct for a replacement system in 2009 was a top end desktop running Ubuntu, but I discovered due to licensing and company compatibility it would be difficult. RedHat with a virtual machine would be more amenable to our corporate systems, but still a pain in the ass for our IT staff who’s valuable time I respect (I have served on and off as a part time IT member during my time at the company).

Virtual machines such as Parallels, Virtual Box, or VMware for Mac OS X enable running windows applications to support compatibility with legacy systems (virtual machine comparison). It will require some planning on the part of IT to automate updates across company, native systems and virtual machines (they’re likely already doing so). Implementing a cross platform/VM configuration process is an unavoidable cost, as I doubt that one uniform operating system will dominate enterprise computer networks in the coming decade the way windows has done so historically.

Linux and other unix variants (BSD) are ubiquitous for web development platforms. Mac OS X is the developer and design operating system of choice among many talented professionals. Often times windows support will come later (or never) compared to *nix alternatives. A strong advantage of compiling source and scripting tools on Mac OS X, is that the transition from OS X to other unix systems is usually simpler than from Windows to any flavor of *nix or vice versa (with cygwin/mingw).

This year I’m up for a replacement to my desktop system at work. After completing the conversion to Apple last year at home, I decided it would also serve as the ideal work system. I transitioned my home desktop from Ubuntu 10.04 to Mac OS X Snow Leopard and really enjoy the polished interface, system stability, and ease of installations for development and practical home software (Homebrew helped). My recent experience with Apple systems makes them far and away the best computers I’ve ever had the pleasure of using for a variety of applications (development, design, gaming, web browsing, and reading). For reference our current Apple systems include iPhones for my wife Michelle (3Gs) and I (4, without a plan), iMacs for both us (22″ & 27″ dual core standard systems), a MacMini (latest gen) and iPad in the living room, and a Macbook Air (fully loaded, configured identically to my iMac, and tuned for development).

What makes me an authority on personal computers

For starters, I’ve been using personal computers my entire life. After growing up with DOS and Basic, I continually worked with changing computer systems through school and on the job. I have always had at least one latest gen personal computer at home for practical use. I’m familiar with many shapes and forms of operating systems, popular software and programming languages. For me personal computers are not just a hobby or a career, they are part of who I am.

A stroll down memory lane, my first memory of personal computers

My personal computing experience began in December 1984 when I was 10 years old. I bugged my parents incessantly for months about wanting a home computer, but for the life of me I can’t recall why I wanted one so badly. My folks acquiesced (thanks mom and pop) and gave my brother and I a TI 99/4a for Christmas. Back then I was just as picky with computer systems, when I opened the gift my immediate reaction was, “it’s not a commodore 64″.

The killer app for the TI99 wasn’t the action game Alpiner nor the space shooter Parsec, and not even the mind bending text game Adventure (go ahead and play it online). It was the Basic editor. My brother and I transcribed text based ascii games into the system programming Basic, before either of us knew what coding was. We saved our work to an external cassette tape drive and really enjoyed modifying our own games based on what we could find in books.

The next system we had at home was an IBM PC clone from AT&T that my father brought home from work. I believe it was designed and patterned on the IBM PCjr (pc junior) format which is the image embedded above. This is my first experience running a pc with Microsoft OS, MS DOS 2.1. Our coding language of choice was GW Basic. The memory I have singed into my subconscious of this system is my first painful experience with data loss. After struggling with writing a long, boring paper for English in junior high school I left the 5.25″ floppy where it was stored next to the chandelier in the dining room. Needless to say, the disk melted and early the next morning I had to rewrite the paper from memory.

Our next system was Tandy 1000HX running DOS 2.11, but we’d boot it up with 3.5″ floppy into DOS 3.0.

I was simply blown away by the game Champions of Krynn along with it’s hypnotic intro midi music after being a D&D geek for years and reading the Chronicles and Legends. Around this time PC gaming superseded my programming knowledge. Graphics were always a bit tricky but the combination of 8 bit graphics (OMG) and midi sound was too much for me to wrap my head around while busy being an adolescent.

Before graduating high school, I was fortunate to score several local scholarships. I decided the best way to invest the money was to buy an updated personal computer, and it was time for me to experience the joy of a hard drive. While the KLH 195 provided me with many hours of gaming joy (Warlords and Wing Commander), it was also the first Windows OS I ever ran. Windows (2.1/3.0) was a big shift in interface to the command line DOS formats I was familiar with, although I could swap to a DOS prompt as needed. I didn’t use much in the way of business applications beyond the default word processor Notepad or Paintbrush, but they were certainly a big change. Programming on the KLH felt more disconnected than on earlier systems, although I did some light Basic coding.

College has a way of beginning the time warp that accelerates as you grow older. Years past and I got my first taste of Lynx and the Web at the University of Stony Brook. At Stony Brook in the early 1990s we used black green screened terminals connecting to a flavor of unix system, BSD. It was in the Library and Computer Science labs that I began my long courtship with c. My first c program was a summer project I picked out for myself. It was a 6 node neural network using back propagation. It mimicked a sine function pretty well but it was a big challenge to get past the picky compiler . A year earlier in the Physics department we used PCs with True Basic to support experiments in Junior and Senior Lab, which I found more user friendly.

My professional career started out with a terminal connected to an office SGI Indigo. It was in this environment that I really began learning c and c++ by working with simulations and designing libraries and applications. One of my first projects was a distributed simulation that leveraged thinly wrapped OS sockets to direct the simulation number crunching, analysis and display elements via a control panel.

I was shocked when only a year later I had my very own SGI Indy sitting on my desk. It was a screamer compared to limited memory terminal and lower powered Indigos I relied on previously.

Windows, Windows, Windows

From that point until very recently Windows desktops have dominated our work environment. My technical manager at the time was the first to push forward with a Micron PC and I was able to get a second identical system in our division. Our transition from SGIs then, reminds me how important it is for a tech company of any size to aggressively embrace the changing landscape of personal computers. It won’t be long before our customers demand we deliver presentations and software compatible with Mac OS X (we’ve had several Linux software deliveries over the years). At the moment we simply aren’t prepared to do so.

As always, I’d appreciate your comments and suggestions.

My first experience with incompatible Apple products was the first generation iPhone. The recharger and cable were specific to this device only, and extra cable and recharges quickly added up. Need a charger for your travel bag so you don’t forget it, cough up $30. Want a car charger, that will be another $30. On top of that if you want to copy anything to or from the iPhone you’ll have to go through iTunes, the worst media database tool I’ve ever used. Give me a flat file system any day to iTunes. Thank goodness for companies like DropBox which allow at least weak file transfer wirelessly. Apple may finally change their tune by releasing over the air synchronization in 2011, four years late.

The second interface problem I bumped into was connecting my MacMini to my LCD tv. The MacMini didn’t accept native HDMI connectors and required a special cable to go from DVI to HDMI. Not a huge problem, but it did require getting separate speakers to have sound from the MacMini out, oh and an extra $30 bucks.

My third pain point was trying to reuse the Apple 30″ cinema display I picked up a few years ago. The only way to connect to this monster display at full resolution was dual dvi connections which many cutting edge graphics cards support, but few Apple products do. The MacMini didn’t, the MacBook Air didn’t, nor did the iMac. There is a special $100 buck piece of hardware that converts from dual dvi to mini display port. I gave the monitor to my folks instead of buying more cables.

The fourth and final Apple networking woe I experienced was transferring (self delusional synchronization) iPhoto databases between devices. My wife did a great job of organizing many of the photos we took over the past year on my laptop on our flight back from San Francisco in November. I tried to merge these changes with iMac’s iphoto collection, presuming foolishly that it would be a simple file system like merge. It turns out all the changes on the laptop were done in iPhoto 11, a database which is incompatible with the version of iPhoto I have on my few month old iMac. In addition there’s no easy way to synchronize photo databases between multiple systems, let alone back them up. This could be the beginning of a great product, as both my wife and I need and desire an easy sync solution, and I suspect we are not alone.

Should Our Needs Conform to Tools, or Tools Conform to our Needs

There’s a great diversity of passionate opinion pieces on the recent tablet from Apple, my own among them. It’s not that the iPad is particularly good or evil. It is inherently more closed, controlled, and more of a media consumption device. It’s great for users that you don’t trust. It exposes a variation in need that can only be fulfilled when we cross the bridge from provider/consumer to personalized and distributed designs. Cost is the only thing stopping me from writing up my own requirements for a hardware spec and getting it manufactured.

As a founder and part time web developer it’s tough for me to want to step back to writing software for dedicated devices, but there’s clearly a gravity of consumer funding supporting quality applications. This is the true battlefront for closed devices. If corporations guarantee an army of consumers hungry for software, developers looking to make lunch money will write apps for that ecosystem.

Closed systems are also an invitation to be opened by other software. Opening one channel at a time can be sold like features to users. The easier the hack the more it will spread. It’s possible with the right applications, to make the iPad a more read/write computer like platform.

• Run code to hack the OS. This has the unfortunate side effect of requiring unhacking to get updates, and then rerunning the code to root the system. It’s is also a breach of contract with Diablo (Apple)
• The first is a choice of popular browsers. Since when did Safari translate as the web? I’m not a huge fan of the Internet Explorer, but I’d prefer it over Safari at the moment. It can run a Chrome frame, and both can support Flash.
• Built in cloud storage and syncronization. This is where an app like DropBox or Evernote can free the device. By allowing me to syncronize files I can do things like play any media I own. The media wall would be broken. Michelle gets a cool song/video and wants to share it, no problem she just drops it into my Dropbox. If I enjoy it, I buy the album, blog about it and evangelize it to my friends
• Virtual operating system application like VMware or VirtualBox. Need multithreading and your favorite software installed? Just fire up an Android, Linux, or Windows virtual system. Even better let me install another OS and virtualize the iPhone Mac OS under it

Technology Changes Behavior, Behavior Alters Technology

DRM is a poor man’s attempt at leasing media. If folks really want to share something, that benefits the content creator and provider in all rationale distribution systems. We are a culture that supports what we love. That includes groovy gadgets like tablets. But as long as corporations like Apple don’t trust us as users, the door remains open for a competitor to snatch the opportunity.

After reading a weighty Endgagdet Review and a shorter review from a tech fan I respect, Fred Wilson, I’ve reached some conclusions about smart phones as a group. They are rapidly converging on a just a few hardware equivalents of APIs.

Almost all the successful designs have touch screens, a mediocre to good digital camera, and are focused on browsing. Some designs mention multi-tasking as a killer feature, but even the weaker multitasking smart phones are quite capable. The iPhone is very capable of allowing me to enjoy music, write this post, while jumping to external sites to copy links. Some architectures (iPod/iPhone) allow all available SDRam to be used by apps, while others have very restricted memory space (all android phones so far). Still, these limitations or lack of restrictions don’t make or break the device. The design tradespace is rapidly converging on what users need in a pocket sized portable computer.

The essentials

• Fully Internet capable in the simplest manner possible. Remembering previous networks/authentication is a must. 3G/4G, wifi whatever gets us connected reliably
• Quality Phone – not necessarily a Telco network
• Largest quality display possible while fitting into a pocket
• a rich software library, but more importantly an active developer community (these guys and gals never get enough financial credit for their efforts). Combination web based/local resource apps are ideal
• Best digital camera and supporting software possible (I’d love bigger optics & faster image snapshots)
• GPS, gyroscope/accelerometer. Must have for augmented reality apps
• Speakers, “has sound” is a killer feature

Local Apps versus the Internet

Although there are many solid local apps for the iPod/iPhone, Blackberries, and Android variant smart phones, most users leverage the Internet connection for reading, writing, and web services. Even apps that are natively Net functional (Foursquare) are much more engaging than stand alone games (Bejewelled). As my friends get Foursquare it gains in utility, but Bejewelled (as fun as it is) remains linear in improvements (developers hours). This ties into designs that leverage Network effects to ride the wave of mutiple user value added.

The next generation of smart phone has more in common with its siblings than differentiating features. The shared interface between human and machine is the convergent quality. Look for the leaders to address this interface as a primary design concern going forward. Perfect voice activation is one level of interface, but imagine interfaces that recognize gesture, neural signals to muscles, and ultimately a device that is capable of recognizing the electronic signals of your mind.

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