ZDNet Australia's reviews editor wraps up his month-long Mac odyssey, but which platform will he end up on?

If you haven't read the previous articles in this series, they can be found here:

A month with a Mac: Week One: The little things
What happens when you make a long-time PC worker use a Mac? First of all, all the little differences come to the fore.

A month with the Mac: Week Two: Apple-cations
Is the Mac application-starved? Our intrepid reviews editor investigates in the second part of our special Mac feature.

A Month With The Mac: Week Three: Mac it so
In which ZDNet Australia's reviews editor plays with Microsoft Mac apps, learns some interesting new terms from the Mac community, and makes a surprising swerve to the dark side.

So, the time has come to conclude things, and work out once and for all if the Mac is a viable platform for me to continue to use. However, in the tradition of the best reality programming, I'll leave you, the humble reader, hanging until the end. Ad breaks may be involved, during which time you're more than welcome to go make some coffee.

Week four Mac observations:

• I've been using other Mac applications this week, most notably Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Adobe Photoshop. I'm well aware of the strong ties that both have to the Mac design-centric community, and having used both the PC and Mac versions, I can see why. Both use the disassociated windows view of the Mac very well, and during a brief period where I had to use a PC and Photoshop (for the review of the Wacom Graphire3), I immediately missed the ability to stack windows and often view images over the sites they'd eventually inhabit. I didn't adapt anywhere near as easily to the slightly different keyboard shortcuts -- I'm something of a fan of keyboard shortcuts -- although I suppose that's just a matter of time and repetition to hammer it into my subconscious.
• Having used the iMac for four weeks, I've come to the conclusion that the default iMac keyboard isn't terribly good. I've definitely used worse keyboards in my time -- and I can recall the keyboards on the old monochrome Macs being much, much worse than this one. Thankfully for me, a solution was at hand; my favourite PC keyboard, the Logitech Elite Keyboard is Mac compatible. It does make me wonder about the overall value when I've replaced the mouse and keyboard on the iMac; about the only other thing I could rip out would be the shiny Apple badge on the iMac's base, and I'm not sure why I'd bother doing that.
• While I'd already seen that the Mac doesn't have as many applications as the PC platform, I must admit that of what I've seen, the Mac shareware/freeware community tends to build more stable and better updated applications than on the PC side. That could be a matter of me always hitting bad PC software, but at the same time I couldn't ignore the fact that the Mac IM client I've been using, Fire, was updated to work with Yahoo Instant Messenger more than a week before the free version of Trillian was.
• As an avowed hater of IE, it seems to me that the Mac has its act together better in regards to alternative browsers. There's always the ever-present Safari, and as I've noted before the constraints of my work environment force me to use IE, but beyond that I've been doing as much work as possible within Mozilla Firebird, which remained solid as a rock within my four weeks of testing. Mac IE once again showed itself to be highly unreliable this week, introducing a number of wacky bugs into our content system, forcing me to work in a strange parallel between the iMac, another PC and Virtual PC. I could tell you what the exact nature of the bugs were, but owing to commercial confidentiality clauses, I'd have to do something nasty and hopefully fatal to you directly afterwards. I'm sure you understand.

And now, the stunning conclusion. Will the Mac community be welcoming ZDNet's intrepid reviews editor into the full-time flock, or not?

Well, the short answer is no. (you can flame me directly here, if you can't be bothered to read on). This is for two essential reasons, although both of them are circumstantial rather than direct flaws on the Mac platform's part. Our production environment is quite specifically PC and IE based (much to my personal chagrin), and while the Mac is useable within that environment, it's a stretch to do so; my time and energy can be better used elsewhere in providing Reviews and Gamespot information to my readers.

The second reason relates more specifically to the 800MHz iMac I've been using. While it's undoubtedly pretty -- I still get other ZDNet staffers stopping to gawk and gape -- it's a touch underpowered for my uses. As mentioned last week, it does remain stable under a pressure load that would slay an equivalent Windows-equipped PC, but stable doesn't automatically equate to quickly responsive, which in an online media environment is quite vital. It's also developed one highly annoying hardware quirk. The optical drive vibrates at an alarming rate when there's a disk inserted, to the point where everything on my desk vibrates minutely, including me. That could, of course, be a particular hardware flaw in just my iMac, but within its tiny frame there's nowhere for the vibrations to go but outwards; a larger Mac could probably absorb this to a level where it wasn't quite so jaw-rattling.

What I will consider in the future, funds permitting, would be a Mac notebook. It's a fine environment for basic writing, the Mac-based iBooks and Powerbooks are just darn sexy and they are (finally) competitively priced compared to their PC brethren. One of our graphical designers (whose production needs are quite different to mine), uses a G4 PowerBook, and I'm quite frankly tempted to scream "Look! There's Elvis!" at him, and run off with it while he's busy looking for the King. So, if anyone's sitting on a couple of thousand dollars that they don't want, or has a Mac PowerBook gathering dust, I'd be more than happy to give it a good home.

What do you think? Should Alex have tried different hardware, are his arguments all a bunch of balderdash, and did you make coffee during the ad breaks? Let us know at edit@zdnet.com.au.

Alex Kidman is ZDNet Australia's Reviews and Gamespot editor, and he couldn't care less about the Rugby World Cup. You can send flames, congratulations or wise comments to him here. Oh, and abuse, if you really feel the need.