Goodbye Sweet Windows

I wrote this about two years ago:

As much as I love the diversity in the PC hardware market today, I’ll probably never buy a windows based PC again. Let me explain:


The warning lights began going off for me some time around the release of windows XP. The first thing that made me uneasy was hearing that the home edition of XP would have to be activated by phone and that the license would have a limited number of re-activations over changing hardware configurations. The second thing that made me uneasy was XP’s new theme, which quite frankly left me dumbfounded in its patronizing fisher-priceyness. The overwhelming sense I was getting was that something wasn’t well at Redmond. Whoever was calling the shots seemed to be making some very strange decisions.


Still, I stuck it out. A couple of years later, I had to buy a second PC for a project I was working on and of course it came with XP. My main machine was still a win2k box and was doing fine for the home recording, graphic design and web development I did for fun. In fact, the first PC usage roadblock I ever hit was in trying to do video editing and in that case methinks the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of the software vendors whose video editing software I wrestled with to no avail. All in all the software was unusable and I pretty much resigned myself to not being able to do video editing at home without blowing a small fortune on professional software.


Fast-forward a couple of years to today. This past summer, I started looking into getting a laptop that I could use in my home recording studio (rather than a dedicated desktop) so that I could easily pack up and move around if need be. I took a moment to consider the current state of the industry and it didn’t take me long to realize that nothing much had changed. MS was still pushing draconian activation schemes, was still struggling with security issues, and consumer grade software for multi-media projects was still by and large crappy. Given what’s been going on with IE and XP’s general stagnation, it was pretty clear to me that MS and its PC platform was suffering as a side effect of this corporation becoming just another soulless money-driven, innovation stifling behemoth.


To be honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that most of my computer usage amounts to graphic design and home recording, I probably just would have switched to Linux, in particular Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 which Novell has done a fantastic job on. If all I was doing was web development, document editing and surfing, that platform is solid, and might I add beautiful. Unfortunately, in terms of graphic design and audio sequencing software, Linux still has a way to go. In particular, the Gimp team despite enormous strides, needs to swallow their pride and admit they don’t have a clue about usability.


Which brings me to my eventual choice, Apple. Growing up, most of the public schools I went to had Mac labs, and a good friend of mine growing up always had a Mac in his home. I’ve always admired the Mac’s usability and single minded devotion to making complex things easy to do, but of course as a burgeoning geek, I always kind of resented the fact that they kept so many details hidden away beneath the hood. Then there was the price factor. Had Apple’s hardware not been priced so solidly out of our range, we may well have owned a Mac or two instead of the mish-mash of Tandy and PC Clones we eventually did buy.


Today the landscape is quite different. Other people have pointed it out and I think its true: a perfect storm of conditions seems to be coming together for Apple that could well bring it the fanfare and market share it deserves. First, prices are much more competitive these days, although hardware wise, they sometimes walk a perplexing tight-rope between extreme generosity (wi-fi, Bluetooth and iSight standard in everything) and senseless stinginess (512mb of ram, 60gb laptop HDs, cd-rw drives instead of dvd-rw drives standard). That aside, the 200-300$ difference is more than made up for by the fact that the software that ships with a Mac is excellent and I’m not talking about OSX.


As someone who has wrestled with consumer grade audio and video software on windows for years, I was literally dumbfounded to find that ‘awesome out of the box’ was definitely more than just a clever catch phrase. Garage Band *IS* an excellent entry to mid-level audio sequencer and recorder. IMovie and iDVD *ARE* excellent home video editing and DVD authoring tools. I know I’d certainly heard people say this before, but it’s a whole other story when you realize first hand that its true, and that was the tipping point for me.


Right now I can’t see myself buying a windows based PC ever again. I’m sick of the politics and I’m sick of the stagnation and corporate bullying. I’m also sick of all the hoops you have to jump through to do things that aught to be simple. On a Macbook I sat down one evening and finally put together a DVD of our honeymoon vacation after two years of spinning my wheels on the project on a PC. From the video capture to arranging scenes, to picking and customizing DVD menus to picking a soundtrack for the slideshow extras, it was intuitive, a no-brainer, and the attention to detail and follow-though of ideas on the software level was exceptional. Needless to say, the results were amazing. When I tried to do this on my windows based PC, I had to go out and buy a fire-wire card, a bigger hard-drive, more RAM and try 3 or 4 different software packages, all of which were duds.


Linux has reached this same high-water mark in terms of office use and aesthetics but I can’t see them catching up in terms of consumer grade audio/video editing any time soon. Unfortunately, the state of politics in the PC world right now is such that its basically impossible to get the best of breed apps for consumer grade multi-media bundled with a new PC. Because everyone is always fighting for such a ridiculously large slices of the pie, you’re just not likely to see Google’s Picasa, Sony’s Acid Music Studio or Adobe’s Premier Elements gracing the same PC default installation voluntarily. Although obviously vigorous competition is good, its unfortunate that in the PC world, the winners of the meritocracy race rarely get to stand on the default installation podium where they deserve to be. In Apple land, by fluke or by foresight it just so happens that the folks who make the best consumer grade software are also the people who also just sold you the hardware. The over-all impact this has on the quality of user experience is difficult to over-state.


For all of these reasons and more, I just can’t see myself ever buying a windows based PC ever again -barring of course a radical shift in values and behavior on Apple’s part, which of course isn’t impossible. Maybe by then however, Linux will have beefed up its consumer grade multimedia offerings and we’ll finally have a much more healthy three way standards based platform war on our hands.