iPod is the gateway drug...

I don't think you can overestimate the power of the iPod as an instrument of Apple's increased territory on the desktop. Certainly for me it has awakened a thirst for all things Apple. There are a lot of people out there who really don't like the iPod; I think there are far more people who like them. Yes, forests of white cables on the bus don't exactly make you look like an individual, but there comes a tipping point where an object ceases to be a "must have accessory" to being "best in class". If you want a portable music player with all the iPod's features, per gigabyte there is no cheaper or better player.

Once you are drawn in by the sleek lines, the minimalistic interface and powerful features, you start to look over at your computer and think "if only...". I really hope that Apple stick with the Mini as it is a crucial product in my opinion in drawing people in. I can see myself wanting an iBook once I get used to the Mini on my Desktop. You see the iPod really is the gateway drug...

Customer Service

I ordered my Mac Mini on the 22nd of February. The internet had been abuzz with rumours about what Apple would be anouncing any day; but I had held on long enough and punted that there wouldn't be any change to the Mac Mini as its hardly their flagship product. Sure enough about three days after I had order my mini, Apple anounced that their iBooks and Macbook Pros now came with faster CPUs. However, I got an email from Apple that day too; I had order my mini with an extra 1Gb of RAM as I had read that most people recommended maxing out the memory. It had been a little on the expensive side, but to my joy the email was informing me that Apple had also reduced the price on the extra RAM; this had automatically been deducted from my bill. I felt assured at making the choice to buy Apple already...

Mac Support Grows

I am aware that we live in a Windows world. However Mac's share is growing and luckily for me my Nokia N80 is supported in the Apple world. I recently found an article on syncing Nokia phones with iSync. This is great news for me as the Mac Mini has bluetooth; the cable connection that came with my phone is useless at keeping a connection, and Windows XP doesn't natively support bluetooth. I did have a bluetooth dongle I got very cheap, but getting it working in XP wasn't worth the part of my soul it wanted in exchange. It has also been announced that the BBC iPlayer will have a Mac version by the end of 2008. Not a huge thing for me personally as I have a BT Vision box now, but its great to see Mac support on the agenda.

Preparations

Getting a Mac will be quite a culture shock for me, so I am trying to prepare. A Mac Mini is a "bare bones" machine with no keyboard, monitor and mouse. This is not a problem for me, as being someone who has built his own machines for a number of years now I have an abundance of spare kit. I already have a nice 19" widescreen monitor which came at a fraction of the price of any of the Apple offerings. I am sure the Apple ones are of great quality, but its simply money I didn't need to spend. Likewise the Apple keyboards and mice look very nice, but I am extremely attached to my black IBM keyboards mainly due to the flat inclining wrist rests they have. I even persuaded my boss at work to buy me one as I don't find any other kind of keyboards comfortable. Mice are also something I don't feel the need to invest a great deal of money in either, although this said I can see myself being drawn into the sleek cordless mouse that Apple makes.

I've invested in a Seagate Free Agent 500GB USB hard drive. I rate Seagate hard drives very highly and have always bought them for my machines. This will enable me to use Time Machine to backup all my data, and I can then also share this drive with my laptop. I've had trouble copying data to and from NTFS partitions in Linux, so I am going to wait until the Mini arrives, format the drive into a native Mac file format and then use scp in Linux to copy data over. Certainly not the fastest, but I have had good results with this copying large files before between different operating systems.

The Apple site has a lot of information and videos on OSX, so I downloaded one to my iPod and looked through it. I have also seen that the "Missing Manual" series of books comes highly recommended. I will probably end up buying this, but as a computer nerd I find computers quite intuitive and don't foresee any big gotchas in just getting everything up and running. I advised my mum to get an iBook a few years back, and managed to get that set up without any fuss. Also, the more I read, the more eager I am to get stuck in!

Where Linux is Lacking

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy using Linux. Ubuntu is a great distribution and has done more than any other single Linux distro in bringing Linux to the masses. However, I find it is failing to help me achieve the tasks I want to do on my computer.

Photos
There are some great photo management applications for Linux, but the main two just aren't cutting it for me. F-Spot, the default photo management application in Gutsy, crashes every time I try to import photos from my camera. I don't do any post processing of images other than a bit of red eye removal and colour adjustment so I won't need anything fancy. gThumb, the other default photo manager offers these, but no tagging facility which is something I use a lot on my computer. Whether or not iPhoto will give me what I want I am not sure, but I am going to see soon enough now.

Movies
I record quite a lot of movies on the digital camera of Alex for prosperity. I have successfully used Kino to edit these now, but its not an easy to use application and certainly not intuitive. Every time I update Ubuntu, I have to spend a considerable amount of time installing dependencies for Kino just to get it working. Also, Kino has now ceased development so I don't expect it to get any better. Again, I have no experience of iMovie but it certainly looks easy to use.

DVD
I have previously made a DVD of the videos of the kids as Christmas presents. These were received very well by everyone, especially the older generation who saw them as something akin to a magic disc. I made these on the trial version of Vista that was released as I simply could not get any single DVD creation application to work in Ubuntu. I am well aware that some people report success in this field, but I spent months trying to get a working solution but got nowhere. This is one area where Linux really falls shorts. There are a number of CLI and GUI offerings, but certainly nothing stable enough to be offered as a default on the Ubuntu desktop. iDVD will work I am certain!

Just Works
You may have noticed a theme here; the iLife suite is something which is really attracting me to OSX. When I was a carefree bachelor with lots of "tinkering time" I was happy to spend hours getting things to work. Now with two kids, I want things to "just work". There are other things which appeal as well; backups are now important to me as digital photos are mostly all we have, the same with the videos. Time Machine looks as elegant and simple as backup gets; I've tried rsync and its not really either of those. Integration with my iPod is a major selling point as well, none of the multitude of music management applications on Linux has really appealed to me its often a case for settling for the one that frustrates me the least. Of course I may be let down by the promise of OSX yet, I should know in about a week's time.

Why the switch?

There are a few reasons I decided to buy a Mac Mini.

1. My main desktop is old. Its not exactly dying, but it won't be long before it does. It also at an age now where the only salvageable parts would be the case and the optical drives. I long for the performance increase of a dual core chip, so that effectively means a new CPU, motherboard, RAM, graphics card, hard drive, PSU.
2. A Mac Mini is relatively cheap. I get the new computer I need for not much more than I would pay to get a new system to self build. I have been building computers for many years now and quite enjoy it. However, the Mac Mini has all the specs I would want, but also in a small form factor (which is quite important to me now) and comes with OSX.
3. I've had an XP install for a few years now specifically for gaming (Half Life 2 for me, Sims 2 for Jessica). Just over a year ago now though we were lucky enough to get a Wii just before Christmas and a few months back I bought an XBox 360 mainly for playing Pro Evolution Soccer against my friend (see, I am not anti-Microsoft). I don't use a PC for gaming any more, and don't really want to partake in that upgrade race any more thanks. XP as an operating system was an improvement on 98 (which was what drove me to Linux), but it has very little to offer me; it looks ugly, its very difficult to customise to your liking and has very few useful applications. It runs ok for the short time I use it but its never felt "comfortable"
4. I got a "free" iPod just before Christmas. Not all the "free" iPod sites are a scam, and I had to press gang some friends and family into spending a fiver for me, but I got there in the end. As I've done countless hours of free support for them they didn't mind. This was my first foray into the Apple world and I was really pleased. I quickly gave up on trying to get my Ipod Classic 80Gb supported fully in Linux; Ubuntu did quite a good job of getting the music on there, but the Artwork failed miserably and with cover flow such a feature in the classic I let XP manage it with iTunes. I know a lot of people hate iTunes but personally I get along with it fine. The longer I had my iPod, the more I wanted a Mac.
5. Vista is just awful. My sister was kind enough to buy me a laptop recently. Its not too powerful, but Ubuntu runs great on it. Vista, on the other hand, runs like a dog. Its a Gateway, and hats off to them, they include a full Vista CD with the laptop. The first thing I did was to reinstall a clean version of Vista, which did run better without the "extras" Gateway has installed, but Ubuntu really showed it up. Admittedly, Vista has some usefull applications as part of the operating system, but still not anything I particularly enjoyed using.

So there it was, all roads seemed to point to Apple. I will mention in another post why Linux no longer cuts its for me on the desktop.

In the beginning...

Well its ordered and on its way. I have finally succumbed to the appeal of Apple and have bought a Mac Mini from the Apple store. I've been a Linux user at home now for around seven or eight years, starting off with Slackware but mainly Ubuntu for the last couple of years. I still like Linux, and Ubuntu is still present on my laptop and my home theatre PC (in the guise of Mythbuntu) and I can't ever imagine a time when I won't have some form of Linux. However, in about a week's time I will have OSX as my main desktop software. I hope to record my trials and tribulations here for other curious penguins...