Hardware and Software

Published 23 June 08 by Justin French

Last week my hard drive started making those wonderful clicking noises, and I started seeing way too many “spinning beach balls of death”. A day later, the system wouldn’t start up, so that was that. Dead hard drive.

I grabbed one of the ‘emergency’ laptops from work (a black MacBook), plugged in the TimeMachine back-up, and was up-and-running on the new system pretty quick.

Physically, this is a really different laptop than my MacBook Pro or the Powerbook I had before it – the keyboard is just plain weird, the lid latches differently, the screen is glossy, the ports are all in different places, the resolution of the screen is different, the dimensions are smaller, it’s plastic rather than aluminum, etc.

Despite this, I felt comfortable on it almost instantly. It was my computer so fast, adding weight to something I’ve always suspected was true – the software and settings installed my Mac is what makes me feel so at home, not really the hardware or even Mac OS X. I can jump on a friend’s Mac and feel almost as lost as I would jumping on a PC.

The system you interact with every day is the one you’re going to feel most comfortable on. Instinct takes over from logic and familiar UIs are forgiven their inadequacies.

When people say “I love Macs”, what they really mean is “I love my Mac”, and when they say that, they really mean “I love what I’ve done with my Mac”.

This is also the reason why I occasionally hear the words “I love my PC”, as strange as it sounds to the rest of us.