Originally posted by: TheStu
I forgot my sarcasm tag,
Sorry, it was quite obvious, it just didn't register
i know that it can play DVDs, but isn't it you know... much harder than it rightfully should be?
'Harder than it should be' depends on your definition of hard and your frame of reference You know what I think is hard? Sticking in a European dvd (I'm Canadian) and being told that in order to watch it you have to flip a switch in the firmware of your dvd player, then switch it back to view North American content and you're only allowed 5 switches
ever. Of course, I got around that by installing VLC, but it was more work than it would have been with a decent package manager.
Why would you come back to the mac (should you ditch it) if not for the applications? Buying a mac in order to run Vista, or OS/2 or linux, or anything else is (in my opinion) a little weird, and somewhat... bass ackward to me.
The only thing that really keeps me on the mac is the hardware integration. Sleep works (almost) flawlessly which is more than can be said for pretty much any other operating system (windows included). Wireless works well, video drivers work well, screen brightness adjustments work well, external monitors work very well (except that I'd like to be able to use the trackpad and built-in keyboard while using
only an external monitor), the two finger scrolling on the trackpads is extremely excellent (although I don't know whether this is more in the driver or the hardware, X might get it for free). Mostly I appreciate the slickness that you can only get if you tightly control both the hardware and operating system in a machine. One point against this is the braindead mouse acceleration that keeps me from ever using a real mouse :disgust: and using a windows external keyboard is a hassle because the windows/apple and alt/option keys are in the opposite spots.
It's not that I dislike the rest of os, it's just that most of the time I'd rather have the wider variety of more interesting software you find on a free *nix (without having to use the kludge that is X11 on osx).
Oh, and one other random good point about osx is the shortcuts for various international characters. Way better than memorizing random numbers to use with alt on windows. I tried to figure how to enter an é in gnome once. I almost cried.
Anyway, if I were to ditch osx, I wouldn't buy any more apple hardware. I might keep my powerbook and run another operating system on it or sell it and buy a lenovo.