I’m on a break for tea as I’m writing this, after spending since lunchtime on Programming Coursework. It’s the hardest coursework I’ve had to do, not because I don’t understand the theory, but because i have never had to write large chunks of C before – add in to that the need for it to work with Lex and Yacc and you have something that is nearly incomprehensible to a novice c programmer. On the up side a simple mistake in several function declarations has solved about half my errors, and I now understand the value if c header files – even if I still don’t get the precise mechanism by which gcc handles them. Ah well, food is here now so I’ll leave this here.
Why I switched to a Mac
The short answer is that there isn’t a short answer. It was a combination of several things I think.
My old laptop was in a very, very bad condition – i had missing screws, a missing cover bit thingy, it had scratches and one of the screws holding the screen in had gone missing. Add to that that the screen itself was failing most times when I started it up. Thirdly, the battery was drained – and I’d already bought one replacement from Dell at an extortionat price. Finally, it was still running Windows Vista and was just plain slow. I mean really slow.
Now, that explains why I bought a new laptop, but not why a Mac, let me get to that now.
I guess, if I had to pick one defining reason, it would be the aesthetics – of both the machine and the User Interface of the OS. This is, quite possibly the area that Apple do best. Also, the fact that Windows is officially supported on them now by Apple alleviated my fears of not being able to play some of my favourite games. Anyone who is not a tech geek, please feel free to skip to the next paragraph, now. The final major reason, is the fact that it is based on Unix, so you get the power, and customalisability of Unix under there. Especially important for my CS degree.
Welcome back, non-techie readers. One of the biggest things I’ve found since switching is the battery life. The advertised 7 hours is actually accurate – even with web browsing or text editing. I’m even considering not taking my power adapter to Uni, and I never shut my Mac down – sleep makes almost no difference to your power. Another thing I’ve found is the screen. I went with the anti-glare option, and it’s jsut so vivid and clear. It certainly seems ‘whiter’ and brighter generally than any of the non-Mac laptops my friends have.
Now, I’m not going to pretend it’s perfect. I still don’t like…. errr. Now I come to think about it, I can’t think of any major thing I miss from Windows, and Windows laptops generally. I’ll be sure to update if I think of something.
Finally, I will admit, yes I have installed Windows 7 on here as well – but it’s exclusively for playing Windows only games at the moment.
A new start
So I’ve switched to WordPress.
Let’s face the facts – I’m not a blogger at heart, so I don’t have the motivation to code up my own blogging platform in my own time. I’d much rather spend that time doing other things – reading, browsing HackerNews and the Internet in general. Plus, this is simple (and much improved since I last used WordPress.
I guess I’ll do a blogpost shortly about my switch to Mac.
Now for a random thought: When did prisoners find out about 9/11 or 7/7?
I guess this is the kind of question you can only think of after a hard day courseworking, at about 10 to midnight.
And I can tell I’m rambling now, so I’ll leave this here and hope to bring you something much more interesting later.
<Insert Wheel of Time quote here>