The operating system
Although it's essentially a PC notebook in an unusual enclosure, the MacBook really stands out from the crowd because of its operating system. Apple has been selling computers with its own graphical OS since before Windows even existed, and it's not about to stop now—especially when it's more convinced of Mac OS's superiority than ever.

Blindly touting complete superiority is an Apple tradition, of course, but Mac OS hit a really rough patch in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Apple had attempted a transition to a modern OS with protected memory and all that jazz in the mid-90s, but the effort (code-named Copland) essentially failed. As late as the year 2000, Mac users therefore had to put up with an antiquated OS when their PC-using pals were enjoying things like protected memory and smooth multitasking with Windows 98 (and, later, Windows 2000).

Luckily, during his exile from Apple, Steve Jobs got some smart people together and had them create Nextstep, an object-oriented OS with *nix roots. For an idea of just how far ahead Nextstep was for its time, just watch this 1992 video, in which Steve Jobs showcases features like platform-agnostic network browsing and dragging voice recordings into e-mails. I won't go into the detailed history, but Jobs essentially returned to Apple and brought Nextstep back with him in 1996. Four years later, Mac OS X was born.

The transition to OS X was a long and difficult one, however. Running old Mac apps on the new Nextstep-derived OS involved using an emulation layer, and it took several releases until professional users deemed OS X mature and fast enough to use on a day-to-day basis. I believe OS X really hit its stride with release 10.3 in 2003, and subsequent updates have turned it into a fierce and very capable competitor to Windows.

Wait, how do you uninstall applications again?
Of course, for a Windows user, getting around OS X involves learning a few new tricks. While most Linux distributions try to cater to Windows users by offering familiar shortcuts and menus, OS X really has a personality of its own—one part classic Mac OS, two parts Nextstep, and one part "holy crap, look at those iPod sales numbers."

If you plan to use a Mac without loading Windows on it, you'll have to rewire your brain to hit Command-Q instead of ALT-F4, to install programs by dragging and dropping them into the Applications folder, to stop trying to maximize windows (you usually can't), and to make peace with the concept of applications staying open after you've closed all of their windows. If you open a command prompt, don't be surprised if the "ls /" command lists /usr, /bin, and /etc directories alongside /Applications and /Users, either. Coming to grips with those eccentricities is easier said than done, even from the perspective of a former Mac user like myself.

Assuming you're willing to give it a chance, I think you may well find yourself liking OS X. Subjectively speaking, everything feels just a bit smoother and more polished than in Windows. It's kind of like hopping from a Toyota Camry into a Mercedes C-class. Both are excellent cars, but everything is just a little bit nicer (and more expensive) in the latter. I found myself enjoying both the little things, like Apple's font choices and user-interface animations, and major features like the standardized search field in most apps' help menus.

For a laptop, three things make OS X particularly pleasant to use: Expose, Spaces, and the seamless trackpad gesture integration. I have two monitors hooked up to my desktop PC, so I rarely find myself running out of screen real estate. Moving to a small laptop display makes me feel a bit claustrophobic, though, since web browsing takes up most of the screen and I constantly have to switch windows. As I noted on the previous page, Expose coupled with the new multi-touch trackpad makes window management incredibly smooth. Gliding four fingers down to get an overview of open windows has become a reflex for me, and I think it's a shame most other notebooks don't offer anything similar.

Expose in action

The same goes for Spaces, which is essentially Apple's take on the virtual desktop concept. I can have my VNC viewer running on one virtual desktop and my web browser on another, and Spaces lets me effortlessly switch between the two with a keyboard shortcut of my choosing. Apple doesn't let you tie virtual desktop navigation to trackpad gestures, unfortunately, but I still find the feature very useful.

Is there anything else prospective switchers should know? Maybe a couple. For one, be prepared to hunt down (and pay for) new applications. You'll find a handful of cross-platform favorites—like Firefox, Openoffice.org, and Skype—but you'll often have to rely on somewhat different tools to do the same things you do in Windows. Expect to trade Trillian or Pidgin for Adium, uTorrent for Transmission, and Paint.NET for Pixelmator. That brings me to my next point: little third-party OS X apps often cost money. I do remember a similar prevalence of shareware apps in the 1990s, but I expected freeware to have largely taken over. Not so. My quest for a full-featured text editor with macro support for OS X led me to TextMate, which costs a whopping $51, and BBEdit, which will set you back $125. Desperate users can turn to Linux apps through port schemes like Finch, though.

My biggest gripe with OS X is the lack of package management. Apple makes the installation process extremely easy for 90% of applications, since you simply have to drag an application file (technically a folder with a .app extension) to the Applications directory. To uninstall, just drag that same file to the trash. Simple, right? Yes, except when you encounter apps or tools that come with .pkg installers. Those tend to scatter files throughout OS X's directory tree, and many of them don't provide a simple way of uninstalling—in several cases, I had to use a menu option to see which files the installer extracted before hunting them down individually in the Finder. Even simple .app packages can spread files all over the place, although tools like AppCleaner exist to remove those more cleanly. Still, that's a far cry from Ubuntu's Synaptic package manager and even Windows' Programs and Features control panel.

From my previous brushes with OS X, I've usually been favorable to the idea of Apple selling its operating system to PC users. After getting to know it a little more, though, I don't know if that'd be such a good idea. I think OS X works so well because Apple has complete control over the hardware behind it, and it can elegantly intertwine the two to work smoothly. I just can't see third-party hardware makers doing the same kind of work, like implementing their own gestures with another kind of trackpad. And without a straightforward package manager, users might have trouble with things like rolling back driver releases and uninstalling fishy adware apps (let's not pretend OS X is immune to that sort of thing). The absence of features like Windows' System Restore could make troubleshooting problems a little trickier, too.

If Apple wanted to start competing with Windows in the PC market, I expect it would need to do a considerable amount of work to support enough third-party hardware out of the box and allow users to add and remove hardware and software more easily. Like it or not, Windows does a pretty great job of running on just about any PC. Speaking of which...