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Moving to Mac Made Easy
Jaguar777 writes "According to an article on CNET, Apple has a new weapon in its campaign to woo PC users: a $59 piece of software that makes the switch to Macintosh easier.
Detto Technologies has started selling Move2Mac, a combination of software and a custom USB cable that helps PC users move many of their files, settings and even background pictures to a new Mac running Mac OS X 10.2. Sounds nice. Is there anything like this in the works for the penguin masses?" Detto has had software to move settings from one PC to another; Apple requested them to make it to move from a PC to a Mac, and will carry it in their retail stores.
and even background pictures
...
thats clearly a "must have" feature, take your background pictures with you whereever you go, from pc to mac, from mac to cellular, from cellular to the fridge door
Now, get me one for linux that also includes a good windows emulator. But, more to the point, the problem has never been ease of use or cusomisibility, but a lack of specilized software that has hurt both mac and linux as a desktop OS. Just getting the neat wallpapers over wolnt convert many people. Still, a step in the direction of instant easy access to all data.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
If I were Apple (which I am not) I'd have this bundled with 10.2 and promote the living daylights out of it. This is the type of tool that PC users have been waiting for. This is one of those rare software applications that would be worth it's weight in gold to the OS company to take under it's corporate wing.
Honestly this doesn't sound like the kind of advertarticle that appeals to the Slashdot crowd. It's fairly simple to change background images, email settings and so on - I don't know anyone who's too lazy to do that. And I imagine many people around here do as I and use a fileserver to store their important information (who trusts their desktop computer?).
In addition to this software apple has the following guide on how to move common settings over to a mac should it not be intuitive already. Guide to Switching to a Mac.
What about my mouse settings? Acceleration, double-click speed, button assignm...er, nevermind.
Is there anything like this in the works for the penguin masses?
Sure dude, It's called a brain...
As a long time Mac user, I recently convinced my wife to take the plunge and switch from W2K to a shiny new iBook. While she loves the form and function of the 'book, and she loves how all the apps work, migration of her data was a beee-otch! This software really wouldn't have done anything to resolve the big issues: moving calendars and email. I was able to to this through several machinations because I (huzzah!) am a trained IT professional (and I'm used to dealing with M$ making it as difficult as possible to move from PC-to-Mac). But if she had to do this on her own, or more-to-the-point, if all of the other mom-and-pop's out there who Apple is targeting with their "Switch" campaign had to do it alone, she would have booted the iBook across the room and gone back to her namby-pamby W2K box.
Apple really needs to address this: they've done a good job stating the case as to WHY a "switch" would be in user's interests: they damn sure need to make this process simple, bulletproof and COMPLETE, before they find a lot of people switching their sorry keisters back to Windows faster than you can say "Blue Screen of Death".
OK.
"Don't matter how New Age you get, old age is gonna kick your ass." - Utah Phillips
If i've spent £1000+ on a uberPC with everything, I dont want to have to switch hardware to run MacOS. Apple will never seduce Windows users while their investment in hardware cannot be transported over.
We all know that M$ is an evil monopoly but I think the reason why they're a monopoly is because Apple refused to compete with microsoft on the commodity PC platform. For years microsoft had no decent rival on platform that brought computing to the masses. OS2? I was a joke at best. Apple had (and has) decent software, but until they grow some balls and decide to play with the big boys.
We see the effect and penetration that Linux is developing on the desktop in the Red Hat and SuSe form, and that is fighting against the established monopoly. This proves that there is, and probably always has been, a market for a real alternative to Windows for existing windows users, but which has been left sadly vacant for years. Had Apple decided to stop making hardware and just sold software, perhaps we would not be in the trouble we are now in regarding MS vs DOJ etc.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Microsoft may be evil, but Apple could be accused of having done nothing to stop it, when perhaps they were the only ones who could have.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
If you are writing custom scripts to do stuff like connect to servers automatically on bootup, then you are not in the majority of users who dont know how to move their stuff over from one computer to another, and are not one of the people being targeted with this product.
Oh cmon, I'm tired of people complaining about how expensive Macs are. I'm a Marine, I earn below the minimum wage, in fact well below the poverty line. I take home $2012 each month after taxes. With that, I have to pay ~$1000 (USD - Yen rate fluctuates) plus food, gas, adsl etc and provide for my wife and 2 kids. Yet I can afford an ibook, and old PC, and just ordered an iMac for the wife. They are not that expensive, if you just manage your money and save for a while. I'm sure someone in the IT industry could do better than me ;)
though if you have to wonder about your game (programs) moving and working, maybe you are.
Just hold tight until Wednesday. Apple is releasing new iBooks and TiBooks. The new iBooks will start at $999 and TiBooks at $2299. They'll both get quicker processors and in some cases larger harddrives. No Superdrives this time around so you might have to wait to burn DVDs.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
If apple had the sense god gave a marshmallow, it would make the migration software free.
> Is there anything like this in the works for the penguin masses?
Yes! It's called dual boot. Mount the windows partition, and everything is there!!
judging by the posts so far most of you are missing the point here: this isn't aimed at those of us who could cope with the (ahem) complexities of copying files onto a CDR, it's aimed at Mr. and Mrs. Joe User - people who just want their computer to work, but bought a Windozer first time 'round.
These people are Apple's target audience with the whole Switch campaign (of which this gizmo is a devlopment). Chances are that if you're the kind of user who can do this for yourself (and lets face it copying files ain't rocket science) you'll already have made the switch (assuming you're not a: happy with what you've got and/or b: convinced that the hardware is too expensive... but I'm not going *there*)
Surely MS-Office for Windows and MS-Office for Mac can interoperate without trouble?
(Ducks and runs)
When Apple figure out how to get Windows apps working on MacOS (don't think it'll happen myself)
Connectix has already figured this out. Buy the Virtual PC 5 emulator for Mac OS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
They drop the priced 50%, they go from generally decent profits and occasional losses to big losses all the time. Sales would go up, but not fast enough to get them out of the rut they were in during the Amelio days -- they were selling lots of machines and had a viable long-term stragegy, but people didn't buy Macs because quarter after quarter of red ink had Wall Street convinced that Apple was going out of business soon and so a Mac purchase would be wasted money.
Also, a lot of the price premium you pay goes into R&D (vs. the "Windows tax" you pay when you buy a new PC from just about any major maker, which goes straight into Microsoft's PR and legal departments.) The reason Apple's software is "insanely great" -- and their hardware, if not i.g., is pretty damn good -- is because they spend the time and money (especially the money) to do things right.
Yes, yes, Linux has accomplished great things with a largely open, low-cost development model. But there are a few viable ways to develop great software -- open source is one (although it's worth noting that an awful lot of Linux goodness comes from paid developers) and real corporate R&D is another; perhaps the best model is what Apple's doing, which is combining the two. The MS way, which involves a complete lack of real R&D and a team of developers which seems dedicated mostly to ripping off other people's work, is not one of these ways.
Before you write this off as mindless anti-MS, pro-Apple propaganda, consider this: I was one of the very few who did switch from PC to Mac during the Amelio years. I did so because I realized just how bad MS software (which I'd been using for years) was getting, and I decided that I didn't mind paying a few more bucks if it got me a computer that did what I wanted it to, when I wanted it to, with a minimum of fuss. And I've never regretted that decision.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I used it when I got my laptop to copy all my mail, dialup, desktop settings to my laptop. It ended up catching all that crud I always forget. Laptop and desktop both have the same "feel" now at about 1/4 the time for a setup (win2k to WinXp.) No, it didn't copy games and applications, but it copied the settings for some if not most of the apps... I can't remember if it copied my PC Anywhere stuff but I think it did. It definately copied all my playlists and MP3's. Just tell it what you want moved or not then let it do its thing. (Downside: USB1 was slower than molasses in January.)
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
I don't know, but based on the marketing speech, there is not much "intelligence" in this software. The reason why it sounds easy, safe and secure for the Joe Average, is probably the fact that it is marketed as a software created just for this "single task" and it is therefore much more easy to buy and understand it.
Yes, the software is definitely for Joe Average. However, that is what sells. Things that are simple and easy and don't require any intelligence on the part of the user. That is why Linux has such a hard time being adopted by the AOL population-- they're not L33T or anywhere close to it.
For instance, I had to explain to my mother-in-law the other day what a web browser was as opposed to "AOL". She just couldn't understand the concept that AOL provides the internet connection and that she could use any "browser" that she wanted (something wasn't showing up right on a site she was using so I told her to try it with IE). The thing was, she didn't WANT to know anything outside her AOL sandbox. All she wanted was for her "pictures to work". On that same note, I think this mac switch software is ingenius! If it weren't for the high price of Mac's, it may be the "silver bullet".
'sok.
Just copy over the PST files to your Mac and run this:
Outlook 2001 for Mac
--NBVB
This utility does seem like it would help standard issue windows desktop users who have no real idea what they need to back up or move over to their Mac.
_ _
However, more than one person, pointed out the obvious. If Apple slashed its prices by say even $500 dollars on the big boy G4s and Powerbooks they would get a lot more converts. I can see paying a bit more for a mac but the laptop prices are just outrageous in my opinion. Not even comparing them to bargain basement priced PCs but to Dells for example and you have to sit back and scratch your head. They are good, sure. But are they that damn good?
Honestly, I am not trying to troll on this one.
What about a Macintosh Powerbook or a G4 makes them worth that much of an apple premium?
I want to see a Switcher price campaign.
_______________________________________________
ACK
My guess is that at least a third of all current PC users have systems with computers without USB ports or Windows 98 (the minimum Microsoft OS that supports USB). This product would be useless to them, since, before USB, there was practically no common interface options available between Macs and PCs. PCs had parallel and serial ports, and Macs before 1998 had SCSI and their DIN-8 serial ports (which are commonly used now for PS/2 style connectors on PCs).
Older PCs don't have CD burners, either. So, to get your data from an older PC, you'd need at least one of the following, in order of ease:
- An Ethernet card (connect by Windows file sharing between Mac, which all have Ethernet, and PC)
- Windows 98 or greater (if USB is available)
- A CD burner
- The Internet (e-mail some files in small amounts to yourself or a friend)
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
The clones did not lower the cost of Macs to Apple -- only to consumers. Apple was paying R&D expenses for the cloners -- nearly 100% of the software R&D was paid for by Apple.
The idea was that the existence of cheaper clones would bring over Wintel converts and expand the Macintosh marketplace. Instead of capturing market share from the Wintel world, the clones were cannibalizing Apple's own markets.
So Apple was in the position of subsidizing (via software R&D and product direction) the cloners, only to lose revenue to them. Apple and the cloners cannot both survive in such a scenario.
While it would have been nice for Apple to have been able to support a clone market segment (I bought a very nice Power Computing box that still works today), it just didn't work out.
And I don't mean to portray this as an entirely civil business decision -- the manner in which Apple backed out of their stated position of supporting a clone market for Macs was pretty slimy. But in hindsight it was necessary to save the company.
Macs have a lot of problems (the most significant of which will hopefully be solved by getting away from Motorola cpus) to go with their strengths, but the existence of a clone market never helps strengthen a company. Look at what happened to IBM in the PC business. If IBM did not have other product lines to carry their perennially money-losing PC business, there would be no Thinkpads today.
for about $1300-$1400, which you're not going to convince me is that much more than a well-built equivalently priced PC.
In other news, it was announced that object X is not that much heavier than any other object of equivalent weight.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Sonar now has Broadcast Wave support. Broadcast Wave support saves all of the timecode and edit information. Cubase SX (and Nuendo for sure) has support for it.
You can save the project in Broadcast Wave (or TLAudio), and open it directly in Cubase - everything will be placed in the right place without having to realign everything yourself.
And Cubase works better on a Mac than on a PC.
Was that easy enough for you?
BMW is never going to have a large market share if they don't let customers buy the cars the way they want. They will just be a niche car company selling expensive cars to really arrogant, snotty people that think they are superior to everyone else. Plus I hear their owner likes to wear black all the time.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Just to add to this: all Macs which have been made in the last couple of years (basically since the Ti PowerBook) have an autosensing ethernet port that discerns whether you are connected to a hub/switch or peer-to-peer. This is yet another quiet Apple innovation which has since appeared all over the place on NICs, switches, etc.
(OK, maybe it's just a great idea more than an innovation, but it's certainly worth mentioning.)
What a plan!!!
I think those might be the two most important, but clearly they can't be the single most important ;-)
I agree that fear is an important factor because too many people are terrified to click on some button on a computer because it might mess up or they don't really know what it will do. Because of this, they will never do anything unless they are babysat.
The main reason that I never learned to be afraid of computers is because back when I was 7 years old my dad actually encouraged me to enter the autoexec.bat and remove the remark line before the command to load the mouse driver. Then I started noticing these lines about emm386.exe and reading those readme.txt that came with shareware and finding out about memory management.
I think that once a person in afraid of computers, it is very hard to make them un-afraid of them. I have been working on my mother for some years now and she is finally coming into her own with realising that you need a generalised knowledge of how things work, not a specific knowledge of every button, keystroke, etc., to be able to understand the machine.
Since moving applications on the Mac is an entirely different order of difficulty than moving them on the PC, a little explanation is in order.
Macs, in general, just let you move applications around willy nilly. The filesystem is pretty smart about linking up moved components and generally all executable components are in a single folder (often hidden as a special bundle folder which, when double clicked, will execute the contained application) or file. Beyond that, there's this neat thing called an alias which does a very good job of automagically pointing to a file's new location.
PC applications, OTOH, most often depend on this crufty construction called the registry which hard codes absolute paths to executables and their relevant components. If you move anything anywhere, even on the same PC, that application is toast until you edit your registry (not recommended for anybody but experts) to reflect your changes. The PC version of aliases are called shortcuts and are more brittle.
So, yes, PC applications won't transfer right because the software can't figure out what registry keys have to be pulled and transferred with the application files. The registry hives never were organized very well and they've gotten worse with age. This is also why MS is trying to reinvent the registry because it sucks. Then again, the registry was invented to stem the horror of massively proliferating ini files so I don't expect that their next reinvention is likely to work any better than their last one.
Congratulations, you are not in Apple's target market of people who want a machine that "just works". Move along now, this machine is not for you.
Even technical users sometimes just want the damn thing to work.
If I were Apple, I'd sell this as a "free switcher kit" - free as in 100% rebate when purchased along with a new Mac. Apple does rebate programs like this all the time, so the support structures are already in place.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Well a lot of "Mom & Pop PC users" may not have USB either
." yes, you can do. But this is not for you.
All new macs have USB, though most have Ethernet also, an honest to goodness 10Base-T port (anyone else remember AAUI? lets make it harder to connect to Ethernet, but easier to connect my Mac to that 10Base-5 line that I run...). PCs of the last couple years are more likely to have USB than Ethernet. UHCI controllers are damn cheap, and have come standard on the motherboard of every PC I've seen in the last 3 years.
To use the (self ironic) Pearl Jam song title, "This is not for you". This is for folks who do not know that the image that is their desktop is a a bitmap and how to convert it to a mac image file and put it in a place to be used as the Mac desktop. This is for folks who don't know where their Windows desktop directory is and how to copy stuff to their mac home directory, where they also don't know its location. This is for folks who don't know what linefeeds are and how to convert them. (Hmm, just came over me, does OS X use classic Mac linefeeds, or UNIX style?) This is for folks who don't know where their bookmarks file is on IE and how to convert that over to their shiny new mac. Most importantly, this is for folks who don't care and don't really care to learn. They just want stuff done. By and large, the folks on Slashdot like doing stuff like this, and like learning. Anytime there comes a device that obviates the need for learning, they scratch their heads and wonder "why bother? I can do . .
Unfortunately the doc is light on the technical side. USB only allows one controller and one host, everything else is a passive device. I wonder how they get this stuff to work, my guess is the PC is the real controller, and the hardware fakes some stuff out to make the mac export its hard drive as a target device, and essentially copy stuff to the new drive. Anyone with more details?
Now, let's do compare apples to apples. First, a dual 2.0 Xeon will beat the living crap out of pretty much anything, and is complete overkill for the desktop. It won't even help for games, really. It's more than fair to compare the high-end single-chip designs, like the 2.8, to dual-chip 1.25 Macs. I plugged in the same options you did, and got closer to $2300. So I would think that the difference is more than you state - a state of the art PC is $1000 cheaper than a comparable Mac.
;).
Now, to be fair, Mac OS is the best all-around OS that I have ever seen. My next computer would be a mac if it weren't for the cost, which is even more dramatic on the low end (I can build a good, new PC for $750, double that for a good G4).
And for those of you who have said "save up," I don't want to! I would rather get more computing power for half the price with the Intel architecture. And, although it's a pain in the ass, I'll dual-boot windows and linux to get a decent OS between the two of them
Honestly, Motorola is KILLING apple. Their growth curve is way behind intel...meaning, if apple used to have the processor lead, they don't now.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Why do so few companies copy Epic Games' lead with UT and give consumers all OSes for the price of one? After all, you've already paid for the code and it would be perfectly legal for you to use it in an emulator. Any pirating-prevention schemes that were developed for each OS should still work with combined media.
The only reason I can think of to sell different OS versions seperately is to finance the cost of porting. But Adobe can't use that excuse as they already have a huge market for both sides.
Question: Since you have a license for the software, would you be breaking any laws by pirating the version for the other OS?
Oh, I assure you, I'd love a computer that "just worked." And I'm not saying Apple should stop selling Macs that "just work" straight out of the box. I'm just commenting that, although a new Mac may not cost all that much more than a new PC, if you already have a PC (and a screwdriver), the cost differential can be far greater.
As for Apple's "target market": OS X is clearly intended to appeal to the tech-savvy as well as the idiot majority; and if you've ever opened up a G4 you'll know it was definitely designed to be easily upgraded with industry standard components. So it seems a bit harsh simply to say the Mac is "not for me." Their marketing may not be currently focusing on people like me, but the machine itself is by no means a bad fit.
A poster below says I can buy a "bare-bones" G4; maybe I'm just being dim, but the minimum spec I can choose on the Apple website seems to be a dual 867MHz with 256Mb, a 60Gb HD, DVD/CD-RW drive and no monitor. Total cost: £1,348.99. Have I missed something? All I'd want is maybe a single 700MHz G4 with none of that stuff (well, perhaps a very small hard disc and a tiny amount of RAM, just so it starts up out of the box). Based on the price of the eMac, I'd expect it to cost maybe £750.
(Which, incidentally, is how much Dell are charging for a complete new P4 2GHz system with 256Mb, 40Gb, DVD/CD-RW drive AND a 19" monitor.)