Sunday, February 10, 2013

Not sold on the Mac

I have an iPhone that I really love, and an iPad that I find very useful also.  So when I dropped my laptop, I thought I wanted a Mac to go along with my other Apple products.  I thought I would be wow'd by it, but honestly, I'm not...  At all.

I have a 13" MacBook Pro, and I haven't really been all that impressed with it.  I mainly use my laptop for checking my email and surfing the web.  I read blogs, and check Facebook and the weather.  And I write blogs and edit photos.  However, I was using Windows Live Writer to write blogs with my PC laptop and I LOVED it.  I figured Mac would have something similar to use but they don't.  They don't have anything even remotely close to it, and the one they do have that is sort of similar is $40...  WLW is free.  I really don't like using the blogger dashboard to write blogs in.  WLW is much easier and better, in my opinion, especially since I put a lot of pictures on my blog.  I just can't format them the way I want to in the blogger dashboard without taking extra steps to create collages first.  I'm already strapped for time, most of the time.  Adding extra steps isn't an option for me at this point.

The other thing I do is edit photos, and I'd have to buy Lightroom for Mac if I want to do that on here.  I would do that if I was sold on other aspects of this computer, but I'm not at all.  And I think their photo storage on Mac's has left much to be desired.  It's a pain in the butt to try to figure out where it's stored photos.  I like being able to make my own folders for things, and I'm finding myself searching for photos before I actually find them.  I'm sure I'll figure it out over time, but I'm not sure I want to stick with Mac at this point.  I like that it has the photo stream linked from my phone on here, but that's the only positive so far.

I don't find this to be particularly faster than my previous computer either.  There are things I try to get into on my Mac (like the contacts/calendar section of system preferences) and every time I do it, I just get the pinwheel thing and it never opens.  It hasn't opened since I got it.  Just kind of freezes the computer.  Sometimes when I'm typing an email on it, it will start skipping letters randomly that I'm typing, which is super annoying.  It takes a while to boot up - much longer than my PC laptop did.

So what am I missing?  I was told by numerous people that I would love a Mac, and I thought I would too, but I don't.  At all.  I'm not sure this was worth the $300+ extra that I paid for a Mac vs a nice laptop.  Do you have a Mac?  Do you like it?  What do you use to blog from?



5 comments:

Jessica Lynn said...

Lol we seriously need to meet up so I can give you a blogger/editing/quick picture upload/MAC tutorial :)

Unknown said...

Half the time I am blogging on my phone or ipad now instead of actually sitting down at the computer, so I have no advice!

Sorry you aren't liking the Mac though!

Allison said...

At my job I could get a mac book OR a Dell. I'd had a terrible Dell during grad school, and so against every bone in my body (ALL PC ALL THE TIME in this family), I got a 15 inch mac book.

I really hated navigating folders on the mac for a long flipping time and could never find a damn thing, and then a coworker showed me how to change my defaults in finder and things got way better. My mac was also grindingly slow, and I finally took it in to the tech people at our university. The disabled the pre installed McAfee virus scan, and that solved it. Of course, McAfee came back 6 months later out of nowhere, but thats what McAfee does.

I don't have any advice re the blogging platform, though I'd love to know! I still use the in browser junk, and it's terrible, but I still use it. I sort my photos in Picasa.

The real sell for me on the mac -- the touch pad. OMG. I looked in to and tried several laptops when shopping for me personal computer after getting my work Mac, but in the end, omg the touch pad. That, and the keys have just the right amount of punch (some similar laptops had really shallow filling keyboards).

If there is a problem with your compter being slow or your keyboard not working, take it in to get looked at. It shouldn't be that way. And it sucks for you to spend your time and energy messing with a jerky computer -- you have enough to do! And you paid that extra 300 bucks for higher production standards, so it darn well better work!

Also, how tall is Ben? He looks huge in this photo!! Dang your kiddos are cute.

Anonymous said...

Love the mac and just blog on blogger's layout. Love it.

Anonymous said...

Waylon got windows parallel for his Mac when he bought his. It never locks up. He got the solid state hard drive, so it will survive a drop. Parallel is basically windows on a Mac. The durability and reliability of the Mac is hands down superior to a pc. I'd look I to parallel i were you.

Lynne