I'm not prone to much Mac evangelizing, but I'm more than happy to drop a link when someone else does it. To wit, from James Fallows in Sunday's NYT comes an article about state-of-the-art "thinking tools," all of which are Mac-only:
These programs are of obvious interest to the Mac community, but the much larger community of non-Mac users also has good reason to keep an eye on them. Some are simply better than their current Word counterparts, illustrating features and approaches that PC users will want once they have seen them. The companies making two of the programs discussed here have announced forthcoming Windows versions.Others may follow next year, when Apple Computer begins producing Macs based on Intel processing chips like those that PC's use. That change will make it easier for software vendors to create both Mac and PC versions of their programs; the introduction of the Mac mini, discussed here two months ago, makes it easier and more practical for users to switch back and forth between platforms.
It's still a cultural commonplace that "Macs are better machines," but "PCs have all the software I'll need" or "PCs are more competitively priced." If you find yourself making that argument, you may want to bring your evidence up to date.
I don't doubt that there are specific pieces of software for which PCs are necessary, and yet, slowly, it's beginning to work both ways, and maybe evening out a bit. And if anyone wants to compare help desk experiences with me (having never needed to call Apple's help desk in 20+ years owning their various machines), let me know. Heh.
That is all.
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i have to say that i recently converted my research pdf archives to a devonthink pro archive because i was ultimately frustrated with spotlight. i have according to devonthink around 36k objects including about 5k+ full-text journal article pdfs, several hundred saved news stories also pdf, and probably 200 reports, ... and devonthink finds what i want... it is quite amazing.
Yes, yes, yes-- this has become dire for pc users who want to do this stuff-- I read Steven Johnson's long piece on devonthink, said wow, and guess what-- and of course, tinderbox-- promises notwithstanding that a pc versions comes soon (what's beta by the way?)-- pc users are sunk. Dang.
It's very telling that in this excerpt Fallows uses Word as a metonym for Windows. Indeed, that's the way many, many people think: it's unacceptable for *anything* to jeopardize the ability to send Word and PowerPoint attachments to coworkers. Hence, no Apple, no Linux, no OpenOffice.