@kaler

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It’s been about a month since I purchased my MacBook Pro. I can say without a doubt that, Windows is dead to me.

The developer in me loves the fact that it is built on top of UNIX. All of those UNIX programs that I missed are available. Aquamacs is the best Emacs I’ve used.

It never crashes or needs a reboot. It did kernel panic once when I first got it. I ran Apple Software Update and it updated the wifi drivers. The operating system and all of the applications running on top of it are now absolutely solid.

The hardware feels blazingly fast. The hard drive, usually the bottleneck for most operations, only spins at 5400RPM. But that is no problem at all because I don’t need to be running anti-virus software. My Windows machine is sitting in the solarium doing nothing and I can still hear the hard drive spinning all the way across my apartment.

For every decision made by the developers, if it was a toss-up between function and beauty, the developers chose beauty.

One clear example of this is with regards to font rendering. Apple released Safari for Windows a few months back. There was a little bit of controversy [1,2,3] with which method was more correct.

I think the more interesting question to ask is, “Why choose beauty”?

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a caldigraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture. And I found it fascinating!

My transcription doesn’t do the enthusiasm in the speech justice. Go and watch through it yourself.