Some thoughts on my story in yesterday’s Globe and Mail about how Macs are making inroads into business user.

I was a little skeptical when I was first pitched on it but the more I got into the research the more interesting it got. And the more you look at the Windows-Apple issue the more you realize it’s about so much hype!

Those I’m a Mac and I’m a PC ads really spell it out but behind that there’s a lot of spin.

Yes, Vista is a joke, as I’ve said and Mac OSX seems to be pretty cool. I haven’t worked on a Mac since I was at the Canadian Film Centre back in 2004 but I used a Mac when I was at the Toronto Sun and I must say I’ve always been a fan.

That said, XP works pretty well for me and I’m happy with it. Despite all the new features on either Vista or even Leopard, I’ve managed to add a lot of them on to my desktop.

The exception of course are the features Leopard has brought in from the iPhone and iTunes like being able to flip through images of your documents, movies and pictures. Some of the other things like Stacker and Back to my Mac are cool. I already use Net Magic on my machines with Net2Go giving me remote access when I’m on the road. I’m also looking forward to buying a Home Server when it comes out so I can automatically and incrementally back up my files centrally and access them all remotely.

So they’re both pretty good and functional…I’ve long ago got past the idea that Apple is “cooler” than Windows. At my age and for what I do, function is everything. That said, Windows could be improved a whole lot.

Active Sync, for instance, which links my smart phone to my PC and PIM is a pain. Why can’t they make it silky smooth like Nokia’s which works better with my Outlook than MS which wrote the program in the first place.

I also think Windows is a process pig. What I like about the Mac and what I’ve heard is that Leopard actually makes apps run faster on the same platform. That I like. I’ve had to strip down my start up and throw out some AV programs because they slowed performance down so much.

What’s more interesting is the cost. Steve Jobs likes to boast OSX upgrades like Leopard which come out every 18 months cost $129 period or $199 for the family pack for up to five users. I like that since with the five users in our household it would cost me an arm and a leg to upgrade to Vista- which based on my experience so far isn’t going to happen.

But we should also point out that while Microsoft upgrades which come out every five years or so, usually late and usually buggy, and cost $250 or more really don;t work out more expensive since during that five year time frame, you would have bought about three Apple upgrades at about $390.

So it’s all relative isn’t it?

Ian Harvey