The real difference between mac and PC

So my parents were down for the weekend. And Ruth, my oh-so-awesomely-technical stepmom brought her new macbook.

It was (is) a thing of beauty.

It's been a good 10 years since I've regularly used macs. Yet they're still consistently touted as "better" than PC's. Easier to use. Of course, the mac faithful take that to a bit of an extreme but still.

As I used her OS 10.5 (?) Leopard system, I was struck by just how...organic...the whole experience was. 1001 things, all of them subtle.

A few examples...when you "minimize" in the system, the page kinda-sorta squishes into a "down the drain" shape and slurps down to the mac-equivilent-of-a-taskbar. But it's not linear...it speeds up through the process. Slower as it starts, and then faster as it slips down the drain. Subtle. Very, very subtle.

I launched Front Row and dinked around with it, showing "Nana Ruth" (that's what my kids call her) how to navigate. And I marvelled at how the highlight moved from button to button. It didn't blink off one, and onto another. It somehow slid ~ again, in a nonlinear fashion ~ from one to the next. Not "ok now I'm still...now moving...now still." It started slow, then sped up, then slowed down.

Again, supremely subtle. I seriously doubt any casual user would have noticed. And this is A Good Thing. They're not supposed to notice. They're just supposed to feel, at some subconscious level, that the mac just "fits" better. Is smoother. "Feel", "fits", "smooth"...all these are subjective, squishy, difficult to measure qualities.

I've also been tweaking my father-in-law's new Dell quad-core for the last 2 weeks. It's running Vista Home Premium. This has been my first real extended use of Vista and while it's taken some getting used to, overall it's nice. The system is certainly fast enough. And it "does" all the same things.

But it's not a Mac. I could be objective and comment on where Redmond decided to use transparency. How Media Center's selection works just fine. But in the end it just doesn't "flow" as well.

Is the mac more stable? No. Is it "more" secure? Not likely. Does it "feel better"?

Hell yeah.

I have a few theories as to why. All of them paint with a pretty broad stroke. So I'll leave that for another post.