I have a Mac. Up until a year or so ago, I was an entirely PC/Windows person. Then I started doing some Silverlight development at Narrowstep, and needed to start using a Mac to test out the cross-platform feature. It grew on me, and I bought one. Frankly, I love it. I’ve entirely moved over to it, except for .NET development (which I do inside a VM running on it).

There’s a whole different mindset to using a Mac. I know, I know; “It just works” has surely been beaten to death (even though it’s pretty accurate). The best way that I can articulate it is, well, you need to unlearn thinking complicatedly.

Case in point - I inserted a DVD into the front of my MacBook Pro. There’s no obvious way to eject it (having been conditioned to expect a little plastic eject button next to the slot, like on a PC), when it doesn’t mount (normally, it auto-mounts, and you special-click on the icon and click eject). So, off to google - “how to eject dvd from macbook pro” - I plaintively type. Several answers:

  • Hold down the trackpad button during bootup (I don’t want to reboot right now! How insane!)
  • Power up the Mac and leave it alone for 10min (again. And, how does it decide it should eject the DVD?)
  • … press the eject key on the keyboard

Um. Right.

It turns out “simplest thing that could possibly work” is still just not inside my tunnel vision, sometimes…