I’m a proud Mac fanboy.  When it works, it works well.  Things have a very high value of JustWork, and more or less I’ve been very pleased with it.

My problem comes into being with trying to interact a lot with more of the outside world.  Office 2008 for the Mac manages to snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.  It’s slow and buggy.  The PDFs that Apple products create (such as from Pages) tend to be incorrect when viewed from Adobe products.  For better or worse, ESRI’s ArcGIS consumes enough resources that it cannot be run in a virtual machine on my mac.

All of these issues were still “put-up-able” enough while the choice was XP or Vista versus MacOS.  I like how Apple has set up the user interface.  That plus a couple of free programs (like Blacktree’s excellent Quicksilver launcher application) mean that I can really focus on doing things without having to think about how I’m doing it.

Now it seems that Microsoft has managed to figure out most of what’s wrong with using Windows with Windows 7.  The interface for most everything I’m using is regular and normal. Its search functionality is as good as Apple’s Spotlight (which admittedly was a Vista feature), and all in all it has a very high value of JustWork.  It moves the major annoyances of computer use from the OS (to which MacOS was the cure), to the applications I’m using.

I’m using Windows 7 right now.  And I like it.