Mac and their OS’s have always been spouted as being a pinnacle of consumer grade IT design and user interface experience.  Pfft, what ever.  I’ve been using Mac ever since the Macs OS X came on the scene, not because of the hype and fan fair of a new revolution in home computing but simple because I was was migrating over from a Linux system.

I loved tinkering with my Linux boxes and made a fairly good living as Linux became the cool must have solution for many schools, government organisations and small to medium businesses in my area.  But as I got busier and my focus became more outcome oriented, I wanted something that just worked, was easy to use, was a no brainer and had a huge amount of applications supported that my family was already used to using.

For me the HUGE factor in my decision, was that I was already very comfortable with Linux and BSD systems and once I worked out how to open a terminal, I was off and running on the command line.  Ironic really considering the effort Apple put into their GUI.  On a side note with the GUI, at the time Mac came with X11.  Awesome for remote XDMCP sessions to the various Unix boxes I looked after.

Oh and breaking out a light, shiny, stylish MacBook, jacking into the clients network  and getting down and dirty with remote X sessions, ssh and RDP to the windows servers in an environment dominated with heavy, square and black HP and Toshiba work horse laptops had a kind of wow factor to those that are into that sort of thing.

Moving on there came the iPhones as both my wife and mine HTC smart phones died, an appleTV as my chipped xbox running XBMC died.  My shuttlePC running SUSE had a blowout with the power supply, so that got replaced with an iMAC, which for me, was the nicest looking all-in-one PC going at the time and I was able to slowly able to migrate to full Mac OS usage by dual booting Mac OS X and SUSE.  I bought a Time Capsule to handle Time Machine backups and file server duties to appleTV, iMacs and MacBooks (my son now had a MacBook as well).  Once we got some iPads, our integrating into the Appleverse was complete, for better or worse.

It has not all been smooth sailing but to be honest its’ been on par with, if not fewer then those I’ve provided support to who are running full Microsoft environments (servers, workstations and mobile devices) and the odd few rolling their own with a complete Linux and Android (mobile devices, home theatre, home servers, PC’s etc).

I do really like the the DIY open source / Android solution with the flexibility (and cost) that it offers for a bespoke environment but I just don’t have time or drive at the moment to install, integrate and manage such a beast, as well as train and support my family or others visiting my home.  But I do still love geeking out reading about it, watching tubes about it and helping other with it.