OS X Turns 5

You should give some attention to a piece that John Siracusa has written at ars technica. It explores, rather brilliantly, the impact of OS X on the Mac platform.

My thoughts are more personal. I switched from Windows to OS X in November, 2005. It was a move I had long considered, hastened by the failure of my Toshiba Tablet PC’s keyboard.

I could spend a lot of time talking about migration and compatibility, but that seems so pedestrian and for most day-to-day PC use, it’s a non-issue. (I can’t resist mentioning Neo Pro, however. Its database structure created a world of organization and searchability from Outlook chaos, and I miss it every day, despite just getting the long-awaited Spotlight function in Outlook’s Mac equivalent – Entourage.)

What has impressed me, beyond the beauty, simplicity, and smartness of OS X, has been the achievement of a new kind of calm that I’ve never experienced with computing before. This is a subtle thing, but there’s no light to tell me when the hard drive is chugging away; it’s hard to hear the hard drive chug – a couple of times when a process is taking a while, I lean down to the machine and I can just barely hear it.

The Windows experience has largely been a relationship with hardware, translated through the GUI. The OS X experience is a relationship with your content, translated through the GUI; hardware is engineered in such a way as to be invisible – at least as much as possible (pressing one’s ear to the machine indicates it’s not perfectly invisible). I used to make a weekly ritual of updating all of my software, in the Windows days; now, weeks go by without me thinking to check my Firefox plug-ins, beta updates, etc.

The impact on my usage has been an expected shift in focus from the machine to my work. And the calm serenity of the OS X GUI enhances my creativity, I believe.

Did I drink the kool-aid? Perhaps. But it tastes good.