Why I Love Macs

I just read an article at Wired News titled:

Why I Love Apple
by Leander Kahney

It sums up the experience I have with my switch well, and I've posted it here for convienence. I've bolded some parts which I feel are especially true:

"I just noticed something about Apple's Mail program that perfectly illustrates why people love Apple and its products.

Like most e-mail programs, Mail's main window is divided into columns: "From," "Subject" and "Date," etc.

While I was adjusting the width of the columns, I noticed that the date changes format depending on the width of the column. If the column is wide, the date is displayed as "February 27, 2006." But if you narrow the column, the date changes to a shorter format: "Feb 27, 2006." If you narrow the column even further, the date format changes to the shortest format possible: "2/27/06."

In addition, the time an e-mail message is received is also displayed -- if there's room. If the column is narrowed, the time disappears altogether.

Compare this to the way other software behaves. If you narrow the columns in the abominable Lotus Notes, for example, the end of the date is simply chopped off. And you can keep narrowing the column until it is too narrow to display any information at all.

The best software, like Mozilla's Thunderbird, sometimes displays an ellipsis as you narrow the column, the three dots indicating that information has been truncated. This happens to the subject column when there's not enough room to display the entire subject line.

But only Apple's Mail actually changes the format. When I first discovered this, I sat there delighted, making the column wide and then narrow, beaming as the date format switched smoothly and seamlessly between numbers and text to perfectly fit the space allocated.

Part of the magic of this discovery was the serendipity. If it had been a "feature" -- a behavior purposely brought to my attention by Apple -- I would have shrugged and said, "so what?" But because I discovered it by accident, it struck me as artisan touch; a craftsman's attention to detail.

It's like adding a beer-bottle opener to the dropouts of a hand-built bicycle frame; or fine Savile Row tailoring that demands different lining for the body, sleeves and pockets.

And almost all of Apple's products display these touches. There's the iPod's slick scroll wheel that accelerates down a long list of songs the longer you turn it; iChat's phone icons that exactly match your model of phone; the instructions for adding more RAM printed inside the machine's casing; or the light around a PowerBook's A/C power cord that tells you if the batteries are charging or fully topped up.

Not all of Apple's products are like this, of course (Aperture jumps to mind), but most of them are. They generally display an astonishing -- almost fanatical -- attention to detail that makes them not just easy to use, but a pleasure.

Other companies do this too. IBM's ThinkPads are marvels of clean, sturdy engineering; Nokia's cell-phone interfaces nicely anticipate the user's intentions. Even Microsoft's Xbox 360 interface is pretty slick.

But again and again, Apple delights with its focus on the user experience. Its engineers and programmers obviously work through every aspect of how the product will be used, and refine it until they get to the slightest detail -- like matching the date format to the width of the column."

-Leander Kahney

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Leander says "They generally display an astonishing -- almost fanatical -- attention to detail that makes them not just easy to use, but a pleasure." This holds true for the better freeware applications available for macs, such as Virtue Desktops, Quicksilver, Adium, and Visor; each is an absolute pleasure to use for these reasons. This fanatacism from the Apple developers seems to trickle down to the open-source community writing these applications.