Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I haven’t used my Sony Vaio in nearly a week. It has descended from the august position of “My Computer” to “My Glorified External Hard Drive” with a speed I didn’t think possible. This is a big deal for me.

I was really good at using Windows.  I was never some Asperger’s-afflicted engineer who gleefully rewrote his mouse drivers to be a micron more efficient, but I knew my way around.  I was what you might call a Power User™.  If you had spent hours struggling with your new router, I could walk in and get you set up in three minutes.  It actually happened once.  Getting a graphics card to play nicely with Quake II?  Not a problem.  I used Opera before anyone ever got the idea to develop Firefox and started using Firefox when it was still called Phoenix.  I was one of the seven people who regularly used, and claimed to enjoy using, LiteStep.

My years of experience with the inner workings of the Wintel universe gave me an almost subconscious understanding of Windows’s secret language.  Ask me to install a strange program, plop me down in front of some obscure “Windows compatible” device, and in a very short period of time I could figure out how to make it, as we used to say in preschool, go.  To my family and coworkers, this knowledge bordered on psychic.

Now that I’m firmly in Appleland, it’s like what Glinda said to the Wicked Witch of the West in that squeaky, condescending voice of hers.  “Oh, rubbish, you have no power here!”

Not that I feel powerless.  Glinda followed that gem with, “Be gone before somebody drops a house on you, too!” and I don’t feel like that’s particularly likely either.  I just feel slightly dumb.  In Windows, folders are just like they were in DOS:  the place where you stick a bunch of related individual files.  In Mac OS X, folders mean things on some deeper level.  Dragging an application into the Applications folder magically installs it (in most cases).  This took a while for me to understand.  And let me tell you, my first experience with mounting and unmounting a DMG file was so forehead-slappingly embarrassing, you could easily have switched the end of that clause from “DMG file” to “a flesh and blood person,” and gotten the same mix of emotions.

These little adjustments are bumpy, but not a big deal.  On the whole, my transition to the Mac has been painless and nearly instantaneous.   This has forced me to acknowledge a harsh truth:  I haven’t been a Power User™ for some time.  I transferred over to a whole new operating system, and what did I really need?  My web browser, my bookmarks, my e-mail, a word processor, and maybe a few special tweaks that most other people wouldn’t bother to seek out.  That’s not to say that I won’t eventually do crazy things to my Mac, and Lord knows that Steve Jobs makes such things easier than Bill Gates ever did or will, but for the forseeable future it just isn’t necessary.  I have to admit that I’ve gone from Power User™ to Normal But Knowledgeable.