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TechTV Screen Savers Host Tries "The Switch"
lwbecker2 writes "Patrick Norton, from the TechTV show 'The Screen Savers', and an admittedly loyal Windows/PC user, recently borrowed a iBook from Apple and has written an article about his three-month experience with 'The Switch'. It seems like a well-though-out review and IMHO provides some balanced coverage of the potential issues and experiences involved in switching from Windows XP to Mac OS X."
This is so much better than any Ellen Feiss 'switch' ad, and Yao Ming, and certainly and Jeff Goldblum voice-over. I know that TechTV may be already preaching to the choir (i.e. nerds) but 95% of nerds still dont use Apple computers. Personally I don't have a TV but as my neighborhood "mac guy" my friends are laways mentioning 'that new cool apple thing' that they saw on TechTV and specifically Screen Savers.
I'd be very interested in seeing a survey along the lines of "Your a PC user, do you even consider the apple platform to be a real alternative?" My guess would be a very low % of people honestly consider the platform. But with the 50/50 split of airtime and having a host 'switch' - Apple just cannot buy better advertising.
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Was there supposed to be more than 3 pages to the article. Patrick just kinda trails off at the end complaining about web browsers (where was Mozilla?).
Other then the web browser problem, I agree with everything he said. I'm lucky, I work in education so almost everything is cross compatible and the funky school information system software is becoming web based.
Apple does need to fix the perceived speed of the Macs, they come across slow. Case in point, we are moving from Macintosh Manager under OS 9 to Workgroup Manager under OS X. Log-in times under OS X seem so much slower than OS 9, even though they are the same, around 15-18 seconds. The difference? Under OS 9 there is an indicator that something is happening, but under OS X there is nothing. Now if they played a little animation or something, they would still appear to be fast.
What, me worry?
Haven't we seen this all before? I feel as all these "second looks" at Apple and Macs seem to all come down to the same thing: OS X is great, there are some great apps, but the hardware side of things still needs work. I too am a recent "switcher" of sorts and do love my TiBook...but certainly wouldn't give up my PC, if only for the gaming. I'm just happy that the Mac and PC have at least *started* to live in harmony. Rendezvous and Samba do a nice job of connecting things and start to bridge the PC/Mac divide. It's too bad Patrick didn't spend more time metioning this instead of repeating things we've all heard already. My only other qualm with the article was the use of an iBook in the review. As a professional in the tech industry, I think he should have been taking a look at the Powerbooks, but I suppose the iBook has its own merits as well.
I was expecting a little more info, perhaps another page or two. But mainly he complained about the lack of an app that I've naturally not heard of, and IE for Mac. I've got 5 web browsers installed myself, there's plenty to choose from. It just seemed to end abruptly, like part of the article is missing.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Another oddity in this review was that the things that went well with the platform usually only barely deserved mention. His evaluation model had Airport built-in, and the iBook pretty much is the ideal wireless notebook. But this apparently wasn't worthy of mention. Another awesome feature of Apple laptops is the "instant wake-up" upon opening thing. Again, no mention. I guess I can't blame him for not worshipping Rendezvous since he only had the one Mac to play with, but even still...
I am glad he noticed that iTunes rules, though. But then puzzled that he thought AppleWorks was so great when it's just...well, Appleworks. In summary, this article is not worth bringing down their server over. :-)
Babar
Well, there is an issue of some "bad timing" here. From what it sounds like from his review, what he really wanted to do was pick up a review unit today that just happened to be a 12" Powerbook with the latest Safari Beta on it. He then installs Virtual PC, installs his iNews thingie, and completely goes to town (since now his video-editing stuff will also be much faster).
But note that I think the comment about waiting until Apple moves to a faster PPC late this year is a bit of a problem. If the question being asked is "should I switch today?" the answer should not be "well, it will all be faster in a year" if in fact there is a machine that fits your needs right now. And if you're somebody who wanted an iBook formfactor notebook that you could use to edit video and run an oddball PC program, then you're *golden* right now. But he started in December, so I can't gripe too much about his choice of machine.
Babar
Some gaming magazine reviewed the 800mhz TiBook (single-processor laptop) very favourably.
The 1ghz TiBook is price-competitive with comparable machines at $2,800-odd, includes a DVD writer which is very cool, and looks and feels very fast indeed. If you need a laptop, that might be the best way to ease your way into the Mac world, since they are not as proportionately expensive as Apple's desktops.
That being said, you may want to wait a few months for the aluminum version of the 15" laptop, said to be coming out Any Month Now. I tried the 12" aluminum notebook, and I thought the keyboard was quite a bit nicer than that on the 15" TiBook I own.
Another thing to bear in mind is that the 20" monitor is a 20" LCD not a CRT; it's pretty darn big. If you compare it to other 20" LCDs, it's definitely within a reasonable premium of what everyone else is charging. Not to mention the giant 23" LCD at $1,999, which is just a shade over half what its competitors are charging.
D
The biggest problem with switching isn't the Mac or OS X. It's when you have to deal with the Windows-centric parts of the world. If you can avoid them (most folks don't need compatibility with odd applications in the office), you could be all set right out of the box with your Mac.
It would have been nice if he went and explained what exactly he meant here. For all intensive purposes, particularly those that his core audience probably would be interested in, a Mac integrates fine in Windows dominated environments. The biggest focus of most (and I know not all people) is going to be file and printer sharing, and the transfer of Office documents -- something OS X handles nicely. A mention of a good version of Office for OS X would've been nice too.
Which reminds me: Windows has some great Web browser options.
Emm, and I'm wondering what exactly those are? OS X has Mozilla, Chimera, Omniweb, iCab, Opera, MSIE, Safari -- the options seem to be fine.
As someone else pointed out, he failed to make any mention of Virtual PC, that probably would've handled his Windows-only app acceptably.
This has actually been one of the worst Switch articles I've read. It didn't really go into much depth, and the things it said that were accurate, one could basically deduct without even owning a Mac. This was written after 3 months of research and use? I could've wrote this after 1 hour of intense use (he probably did). Why is it this article looks like some lazy-ass had a Mac, didn't use it for three months, then tried to meet an article deadline two nights before?