Some things I really like about Apple computers

They work just 'out of the box' -- There is no complicated setup. It's really that easy: take your new Mac out of the box (and they are beautifully packed, by the way!), plug in a few cables, switch it on, start working. No complicated installations. Everything you'll need is included. Much easier to set up than a linux system and really a complete package of software compared to Windows.

They are very silent -- I'm a bit tetchy concerning noises and I dislike computers which hum too much. My iMac is acceptable in this repect. It has a fan, but usually it runs at low speed.

There are a lot of things I like about my Mac. It is an iMac G4, 1.25 GHz with 20 inch TFT, SuperDrive, iSight, DSL connection and Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. I really like for example the design and the quality of the components. The Apple Cinema Display is first rate. The keyboard has a comfortable and positive feel and is just as large as necessary, without one or two centimeter frame around it. It doesn't consume much space on my desk. The iMac reacts promptly to everything I do and I never have the impression I have to wait for something like windows opening, files saving, etc. The mount of the display makes it easy to change its position which is very ergonomical: you don't have to sit at your desk the whole day in the same position to view the screen, you just reposition the screen if you change your position. Very nice. Actually, I do that constantly: with one gentle and effortless touch the screen is again in the perfect viewing position, when I move. The computer itself has a diameter of only about 27cm and doesn't fill up my desk. And the white-and-acryl design is almost a work of art.

Unix and X11 -- I use my Mac at home to connect via DSL to Linux computers in our institute. X11 works perfectly fine and I'm happy that I can run everything from xemacs to PAW remotely. And also beneath the nice Mac OS X surface is just an (almost) normal UNIX which allows me to compile my code on my Mac. The only oddity is, that Mac OS X is case-respecting but not case-sensitiv. It cannot distinguish between myfile.txt and MyFile.txt, but this never caused trouble so far. Anyway, it's a bit strange and I don't understand why Apple implemented it that way.

Typography -- Mac OS X comes with lots of useful and beautiful fonts and Apple included a great application to manage the fonts, called Font Book. Cocoa based applications can directly use all those fonts.

Typography.

iChat AV and iSight

Safari and Sherlock

Drag and Drop

Quick Time

Expose