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TechTV Screen Savers Host Tries "The Switch"

Posted by pudge on from the waaaah-the-g3-is-too-slow-and-my-program-won't-run dept.

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."

4 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. No Such Thing Asd Bad Advertising by ihatewinXP · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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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    ---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
  2. A good article, but... by ejunek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. This is an oddball review of the platform... by King+Babar · · Score: 5, Insightful
    OK, so this was a strange little review. As best as I could tell, the system performed flawlessly, and better in fact (by implication) than his Windows machines, but then he whined about precisely 3 things about his set-up that weren't good for him.
    1. The guy borrowed and used an iBook (=slowest machine in the Mac line-up), then talked about how the G4 doesn't cut it, speed-wise. Especially for video editing. Does anybody else see something wrong with this picture?
    2. His entire on-line work-life depends on a bizzaro application that I'll bet 95% of the world has never even heard of that is PC only. Unsurprisingly, it won't run on his Mac, and that's a problem.
    3. He doesn't like the browser situation, which is fair enough, but then reports on experiences that I think I can safely say are somewhat atypical. So Chimera was never tops on my "force quit" list, Safari is and was very impressive (and not "unstable even for a beta") and he is apparently the only person I know who can't get Preview or Acrobat to start-up automatically for PDF files from the browser. (For that matter, he seems to think that if Acrobat is running inside a browser window, that it doesn't download the document?)

    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. :-)

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    Babar

  4. Worst Switch Article Ever by bedouin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?