Tell them, my song.

That’s a discussion thread from Macrumors and my response to it. I guess today is one of my more Mac-friendly days.

Yeah, sure. You can also “tune” a VW Golf until it is as fast as a Lamborghini, but you would still not be driving the real beast.

For what an iMac cost, you would still not have a PC that outperforms the iMac AND have the killer 27″ display that the iMac has. And you’d definitely NOT have an all-in-one-PC for that money. And guess what? The fact that the iMac is an all-in-one machine is one of the reasons to buy it. At least it was for me.

Then, you would NOT have an almost noiseless PC for that money. The iMac IS as good as noiseless. And it still has a quad core CPU. For me, that was THE reason to buy it.

And now comes software. OS X versus the rest of the world on the desktop. The rest of the world loses. It’s as simple as that. 64-Bit Windows 7 is a good operating system and I have it on my company notebook. Linux is an awesome operating system and I run it in VMWare and on a load of servers. iOS is a piece of shit and Android is pretty cool as far as platforms for mobile gadgets go. But the most user friendly desktop operating system on the planet remains Mac OS X. End of story.

Then comes the quality of third party software and the unbelievable love for detail that goes even into average Mac software. Mac OS X has the best ecosystem for quality software – Windows has MORE software, but rarely better applications. It’s just more fun to work with a Mac. Plain and simple.

Macs suck for gaming, though. Totally. But there is this thing called Xbox 360 that solves that problem – and it can be hooked up to the iMac. Display Target Mode. Killer feature. The Xbox 360 looks great on the 27″ iMac (but you have to buy the adapter box from Dr Boot to get it running).

And yes, design is an important factor for me too. I love beautiful and cool things. I have a knight’s armor in my living room, too. (And no, I am NOT kidding – it’s true.) I also prefer good wine like the Spanish “Faustino I” over cheap crap. That doesn’t mean that wine has to cost a lot in order to be good, but it usually helps with the quality. I only drink Single Malt Scotch like Laphroaig, Glenfiddich, GlenMorangie, Ardbeg or other stuff that is at least in that league – I don’t drink garbage like 3-year-old Johnny Walker or Jim Beam. We only eat fresh food that we cook ourselves.

Why do you think should I settle for a noisy, ugly, cheap PC again?

The PC that I would buy would certainly cost at least as much as any Apple machine, and performance would NOT be the decisive buying factor for me. The noise level of the box would be the first factor, then its Linux compatibility (I certainly would NOT run Windows as my primary platform at home anymore), then design, then tech specs.

I make my living in B2B-satellite communications and I am a very demanding user. I just no longer care how great Crysis 2 runs on my computer. I’m a totally different target audience than you are. That’s why I bought a Mac.

I’ve been loosely watching the progress of Canonical’s efforts on Unity, and I’m currently running Ubuntu 11.10 in VMWare Fusion 4 on my Mac. To make it short, I don’t think that Unity works. At least it doesn’t work for me. There are no Linux applications that in any way integrate well into the Unity desktop, and it’s a mess to switch between applications using the GUI. Unity is counter-productive, it’s lacking features and although it does not allow the user to do much it still doesn’t make anything actually simpler. Canonical only dumbed down the user experience without providing any real benefit.

“If you make a system simple enough that an idiot could use it, only an idiot would want to use it.” That’s exactly what Ubuntu 11.10 feels like for me, and that’s why I don’t want to use it. I think Canonical should dump Unity and start all over again from scratch. Unity is a wasted effort.