Me and My New Mac, Part 3

This is the third in a series of posts exploring my ongoing experience with my first Mac. For the first entry in this series, click here. For part two, click here.

Let's talk about the facts of life - iLife. For those who don't know, iLife is the suite of software included with every mac that is comprised of iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, iChat, etc. At the end of my last post I promised a review, and here it is: this software is absolutely incredible. iPhoto has a feature that identifies the faces in a photo, and once you've given names to a few of them, the software can go through your entire photo collection and identify with some accuracy who is in the photo. This has got to be the most useful feature in the history of photography. Well, ok, maybe second most useful behind only the camera.

If you've used iTunes on a PC, you may have had the same experience I have - iTunes on the PC is buggy, likes to crash for no apparent reason, and takes forever to run. iTunes on the Mac suffers from none of these issues, and is a very stable and snappy program.

I could continue on about iLife for pages. I could tell you about the awesome experience I had with iMovie the very first time I used it, or the Places feature of iPhoto, or the amazing clarity through the iSight camera in iChat. The bottom line, though, is that Macs have a huge leg up over windows machines when it comes to out-of-the-box functionality. Every piece of software I just mentioned is free and comes pre-installed on every Mac. Until I used them myself, I never would have believed that this software would be this much fun to play around with.

This will likely be the last in this series for a while. At this point the Mac is an integral part of my technological suite at home. The effect the iMac has had on my technology usage is that my very nice laptop is used only at work and for gaming now. I have a feeling that in the coming years, we will likely move from a home with several PC's and an iMac to a home with a bunch of Macs and one or two gaming PC's.

It's official, I've converted.