What is the Best Celtic Computer?

Why is the Macintosh a Celtic computer? you ask. Well, it does have a good Scots name. Many Celticists have found the Macintosh and the Mac OS useful for working with Gaelic and other Celtic languages.

I admit freely that I am a devout Macintosh user and bigot. I started using computers back in the days of the Tandy TRS-80 and yes, even the Timex Sinclair. I’ve been using Windows, in various flavors, on a daily basis now for a few years. Now I support and teach users to use Windows and various Windows applications. (If you use or support Windows, I suggest you take a look at Windows Annoyances.) But though I have supported Windows users and have helped test and develop multimedia CD-ROMs and applications that run under Windows, I prefer macOS and iOS.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot with my iPad. I even wrote some books about doing stuff with an iPad. The 7th generation iPad is really lovely for writing, reading, photo editing, and watching video. With easy syncing between iOS and macOS, I’ve been doing a lot of writing in Bear, in Pages and, most of all, in Scrivener. And then there’s the amount  of keystrokes I save using TextExpander.

Mac OS X really is Unix under the hood, but you don’t have to even think about the Unix underpinnings, unless you want to. You have the beautiful, flexible, easy to use Aqua interface, so you don’t have to use the Unix command line, unless you want to. You get FireWire, USB, Airport, a modern memory management system, support for an enormous variety of languages, including Unicode, open standards. And you get all the Unix stuff you’d ever want—including Perl, Apache, even Unix shell script support from Apple’s own AppleScript. Plus, even with the new Unix based Mac OS X and the Apple default firewall, you still have a lot more security with a Mac than most other operating systems, including any flavor of Windows.