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When Is There a Good Time to "Switch" to Apple?
AllNines asks: "With all the hype of MacWorld and the compelling keynote given by Steve Jobs about the upcoming Tiger and Spotlight, I am thinking about 'switching' (Linux user since '97) but I am not sure the time is right. It seems like the PowerBooks are getting very long in the tooth and the iPods are due for a major rev. When is the right time to jump on the Apple ship? Am I going to get burned by a sluggish overpriced laptop that is updated next month?"
I had a similar problem a while back - I jumped in and bought my 12" PB just before they speed-bumped it.
To be honest, it hasn't made too much difference, it's still far and away the best laptop I've ever used. Just get enough RAM!!
The thing is really, there isn't ever a 'best' time to buy anything like this. Look at the PC market - we have new motherboards, cpu's etc. coming out all the time.
At least with Apple its fairly regular that they do major updates, usually at MacWorld time!
I think the best time will be very soon. Wait till they release Tiger, and start shipping it on the Minis (or just get one and pay for the upgrade).
The Mini is the cheapest Mac available, and you can re-use all your old monitor/mouse/keyboard etc. Hell, even if you dont like it as a proper desktop, there's still the media-centre/server thing everyone seems keen to turn these babies into.....
My iMac G5 arrived yesterday. I haven't had much time to play around with it but so far i'm very impressed with it. OS X is a bit weird at first, but after a short while you'll feel very comfortable with it.
You're probably gonna get a lot of "wait for the new product announcements" or "wait for Tiger" comments, but seriously, why should you wait? New products might be announced next week... maybe the week after that, maybe the month after that, hell you might end up waiting until June. Or you could just buy one now, and you'll be sure that whatever you buy will most likely still run the latest versions of OS X and other software in 4 years time.
You're missing the point. A useful computer is not one with a stable OS or one with a GUI interface (computers have had those for ages, even back to Windows 3.1. Well, maybe not the stable OS bit.)
The main benefit of Mac OS X is the quality (and integration) of the applications. You can drag-and-drop any file onto any application, and (if it understands the format) it will open it. You can use any application's print command to get a PDF, which can be searched in the same preview window. Hell, in Tiger, you'll be able to look for a phrase anywhere in any document of the system. Want to know the signature of the Runtime.exec() method? Type in 'Runtime.exec()' in the spotlight bar, and it will bring up the JavaDocs and PDFs that have that phrase on your system.
All Cocoa apps have access to text-to-speech synthesis (thus; it's easy to use a remote phone to dial up and have it read your e-mail contents over the phone, which is very useful if you're a road warrior) via the built in services. You can open a URL in any application with a single keystroke, or send a file to a bluetooth device.
It syncs with your phone, your printer is discovered automatically, and if you've got a SlimServer running on your network it's already in your browser's bookmarks.
Oh, and you can get hardware that works. No, you don't have to google across multiple websites to find supported hardware, or see what the initialisation string you have to hard-code in a config file. You plug it in. It works.
Problem with your system booting up? Boot it and hold down Command+T, then plug another Mac box in with a firewire cable; you can browse the mac as a very large and expensive firewire disk.
And for those of you that love multi-button mice; yes, they work out of the box. No config file changes, no having to configure apps for each key combo. It just works.
As an operating system, Mac OS X and Linux are very similar; Unix was designed to be.
As a user experience, Macs Just Work.
When is the right time to jump on the Apple ship?
In general, the time to switch platforms in any direction is when you've finally got everything running smoothly on your current platform of choice after some major disaster. I'm sure that seems illogical at first, but it stems from the fact that you do not want to switch when you're in the middle of an emergency. If things have always been smooth, there's no need to switch at all. If things are becoming a reoccurring mess, resolve to switch, but then still clean up the current mess! It'll make the switch that much easier when you're not trying to transition all the mission critical stuff a once.
Am I going to get burned by a sluggish overpriced laptop that is updated next month?
Only if you're a fucking idiot. If you think a Mac is sluggish today, why the hell would you buy it? It doesn't matter if a vendor is updating their systems next week or next year. Either what they're offering today meets your needs or it doesn't, and if it doesn't and you still buy it, then you should probably be fired (or beaten by friends and family). The march of technology still guarantees any purchase you make is an expense, not an investment. Stop pretending you can wait to "buy low" because you will never, ever be able to "sell high".