It’s been a year since I switched to a Mac and the first thing I can say is that’s a successful switch! I’ve enjoyed using MacOS X so much this year, it was a full experience. The iLife application suite is so amazing that the switch worth it. Here is my little review of this year of experience.

iTunes

iTunes is sure a killer app. I’ve never listen to music so much in one year. The way iTunes deals with music and made it available with smart search in a second is awesome. You really don’t have to take care of a bloated file organization anymore, iTunes take care of finding what you want. Since the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in France, I’ve been able to discover a lot of new kind of music. iTMS is an example of integration, before iTMS, it was a pain to listen to a preview on a commercial site, now it’s a real pleasure. Preview starts to play in a second and you jump from music to music in one click. I’ve also bought music through iTMS and believe it or not, it works perflectly. The store is always up and you’ll download your songs at full-speed, 0.99€. Some weeks ago, a friend of mime told me that he found some glitches on some music he bought and he was totally refund in a couple of days! Who said Apple didn’t take care of its customers?

Digital Hub

I fell right into the Apple marketing trap. My Mac has become the central repository for all my digital data and especially photos. Pretty much like iTunes, iPhoto make it very easy to organize thousands of photos. You won’t feel sick anymore by thinking how to deal with the mess of your photos. iPhoto take care of the thing and you won’t loss your time again. Just take photos.

MacOS X

MacOS X is the state of the art in terms of operating systems. Actually, there is nothing new in this system, every built-in technology exist for years. But what makes MacOS X different is that all these technologies works together and in one operating systems for the first time. MacOS make everything available to applications as a complete set of services. That’s why any third party applications integrates so smoothly into the system, even Microsoft Word looks great!

I’ve been using GNU/Linux for years, I know it pretty well and it’s my primary system at work. It’s still far behind MacOS. There is a lack of focus in the GNU/Linux community that really hurts the coherency of the whole system. There is no vision of what should be the OS and where it should go, you can feel it in a second. Being an Unix system is not enough and GNU/Linux is still too low-level. There are some initiatives starting, but a lot of work is still to be done to achieve the same level of experience as of MacOS X.

You

As I belong to a lot of different communities, I can tell that I do like the spirit of the Mac community. You feel respected as a user and Mac developers care of their users and do polish their applications. This is so rare in most communities.

Finally, I’ve become a real Mac enthousiast and I do think Apple is now the alternative solution.