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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."
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
OS X may have crashed once in three months, and I may have mistaken an OS crash for the browser going down.
Typical Windows user; can't tell the difference between an OS crash and his browser going down.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
After Patrick Norton spent his three months with the iBook, he gave a great review right on par with what a daily Windows user would say. He likes the machine, and the operating system. The only problem was stuff he couln't go cross-platform on. They use some Windows-only scheduling software at TechTV. He also mentioned the price of the machine being a little high, but also commented on what software was already installed as a way to visualize offsetting the price. They'll probably rerun it in a couple of weeks. Check it out.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
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?