Mac For A Month – 6) The End

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Mac For A Month – 6) The End

My ‘Mac For A Month’ is finished. I didn’t do a full calendar month but decided to go with the average number of working days in a month: 21. Though actually it was only 19 days because Lucidica had to move rooms in our building and setting the Mac up again for just Friday and Monday made no sense.

So what’s the outcome of my month?


Well basically I was expecting to learn more from this time and I honestly thought (and hoped a little bit) that I would like the Mac more after my time.  I was absolutely wrong and in the end I couldn’t wait to get back on my Windows 7 computer.

The reason I didn’t learn as much as I hoped is mainly due to our extremely busy service desk. I take on dozens of jobs during the day and I simply didn’t have the time I wanted to play around and have some fun with the Mac. I mostly logged on to our clients computer via LogMeIn, used Outlook, Remote Desktop and other similar IT engineer tools.

Another issue I noticed is that over the month my productivity dropped dramatically. I couldn’t really log my time properly and it usually took me a lot longer to complete tasks. In general I’ve been annoyed, irritated and swearing on daily basis when the bloody Mac didn’t do it’s job properly. But the good news is that now I’m back on familiar ground I’m smiling again and crucially I’m keeping my jobs queue in good shape again!

In my opinion the Mac is not the best tool for my type of work. The majority of computers we work with on a daily basis are PCs and using  programs designed on Windows on a Mac is simply not a great experience. As I’ve said before, LogMeIn is especially clunky and slow, meanwhile LogMeIn Rescue was completely inoperable. Put simply: if you work in an IT support company I wouldn’t recommend a Mac at all.

I’m not saying that my time on a Mac was pointless, indeed, it was the opposite. I learned a lot, and I’m much more capable of working with Macs than I was when I started the month. The point of my time on a Mac was primarily as part of my development as an Engineer. To that end, it was very successful.

You may also have seen that I received a very mature comment on one of my blogs, stating that because I didn’t get on with the Mac I was stupid.  Well that’s your opinion… but we all have different opinion on what’s stupid.

For instance I think it’s stupid to pay hundreds, sometimes thousands, on an Apple product when you can get something better for half the price. Believe me when I say that ‘buy cheap, get cheap’ should be my middle name: I NEVER go for the cheap option. If I have two pair of shoes, same brand, same size, shape and look I would take the one pair that cost more. That’s why when it comes to buying an Apple I would NEVER pay more… and I think that’s plain stupidity.

So that’s the end of my Mac For A Month series. I’m returning to the PC and the Mac has an exciting future as a pot for our office plants.

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So that’s it for Kristján’s Mac For A Month and we promise we’ll return his PC shortly before he harms any poor computers. Despite Kristján’s negative ‘Macxperience’, Lucidica remains ‘technology agnostic‘. Around 20% of the computers we provide IT support for are Macs, and we’re more than happy to help out with any tech that your business uses – be it Windows, Macs or other!

But if it’s a Mac you probably won’t get Kristján as your engineer…