Pros and Cons of Switching From Windows To Mac

It's been a couple of years since Apple ran their Switcher ads — but folks are still making the switch. Rockgod writes to point us to his list of pros and cons after he switched from Windows to Mac recently. From the article: "It took me a long time to be convinced that Windows 3.1 was a better program launcher than X-Tree Gold, but it happened eventually. Since then, I have been a sucker for every upgrade — 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000, XP... I bought the cheapest Mac available, a Mac Mini with a single-core Intel chip and the minimum of RAM — 512 MB. It cost me AU$949. Since plugging it in, I have barely used my $3000 Windows desktop... All this time later, I have almost exclusively switched to the Mac."

Comments

Re:$3,000[!]

[antifoidulus]

I'm assuming he means $3k AU since he mentions how much the mac cost in Australian dollars earlier in the blurb. 3k Aussie dollars is about 2275 USD, still a bundle but....

a step above any Linux distro ?

[rs232]

"The GUI: It didn't take me long to get used to it. It is super smooth, even on the cheap Mac Mini .. It makes Windows XP look very late-nineties."

"It's Unix!: You've got a very, very nice GUI but under the hood is good ole' Unix"

"It is only when you open the Terminal and get to a shell that you see all the ancient Unix directory structures, combined with Apple's more hip and happening directory names like Applications, System, etc"

"Notice I didn't say anything about viruses, trojans, spy-ware? I haven't been infected in three months on the Apple .. I don't run as an administrator. This simple action protects you from about 99% of malicious software. It is a simple fact."

"unless you are a rabid freedom-fighter it is a step above any Linux distribution out there. KDE and GNOME are still a long way away from achieving the polish that Apple has delivered with Mac OS X"

Re:a step above any Linux distro ?

[nine-times]

Let's see, OSX's interface is...

simple..............check
uncluttered.......check
low color...........most interface elements are black/white/grey, so check
high contrast.....if not enough so, you can increase the contrast, I suppose, so check
has a terminal...check

So you're an OSX fan, then?

Mouse Acceleration Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

To solve the Apple's mouse acceleration problem, install a utility called SteerMouse or better yet, buy a third party mouse like Microsoft and Logitech and use their driver. Then your mouse acceleration will be just like Windows. Switchers are always complaining about this and rightly so, it's a pain if you aren't used to it.

OSX Talks to Everyone

[Greyfox]

OSX gets along quite well with Linux (X11, Samba and ssh) and Windows (Remote desktop, Samba.) It also syncs to my Symbian 60 cell phone using bluetooth, can use the cellphone to connect to the Internet via bluetooth and does wireless networking on most Apple systems. It seems to be able to use those problematic Microsoft file formats and and you have your choice of DRMed and unDRMed media. It has a better selection of games than Linux does, though not as good a one as Windows does (No EVE Online client for OSX but you apparently can play WoW...) You also have tons of open source software that you can install on it.

Overall I'd say OSX is an excellent choice for Windows users who want the advantages of UNIX without having to learn arcane lore, for Linux users who need a laptop that will just work without requiring a virgin sacrifice during a full moon and for people who need to talk to a variety of different systems in a heterogenuous network. It's a bad choice for Microsoft executives, MCSEs or anyone else who makes a living on Windows being the dominant OS in the market. If you're somewhere in the middle you should probably pick OSX for the better security. It's not perfect, but any improvement is better than nothing.

Re:stay tuned, I'm waiting for my new mini

[Firehed]

Well, when it comes to switching, it tends to mean that you liked the thing you switched to more than the thing you switched from. In this case, preferring Macs to Windows.

Re:Disappointed

[Y-Crate]

It is just as slow, crashy, inconvinient and annoying as the rest (With a few less annoying "update me" popups than Windows, perhaps).

I've never known anyone to consider OS X as crash-prone as Windows.

Expose is cool, and the smooth movements of some appearing windows (rather than a one-frame screen-update) is also nice. But these are the only 2 serious improvements I've seen. Things are still very slow to launch, programs crash, and things fail for configuration reasons.

Programs are slow, crash-prone and things can be misconfigured? That's obviously the OS's fault!

It doesn't have any easy and useful way of exposing available keyboard shortcuts (as in KDE's readily available shortcut settings dialogs, Emacs's show-keybindings command, etc).

The keyboard shortcuts are listed directly next to the menu option in drop-down menus. Example

For people with a background of both Windows and KDE, who had no troubles with either or with Gnome/etc, it is still very difficult to figure out how to make shortcuts to applications, copy files (rather than make shortcuts), etc.

It's under the FILE menu under "Make Alias" and in the right-click contextual menu under "Make Alias". I'm not sure how this could be implemented in a more effective manner.

All in all, the Mac is yet-another-lousy-GUI, in my opinion.

A computer is not a GUI.

Disclaimer: I'm a KDE fan [though I believe all of today's GUIs, including KDE are very lousy], and not too fond of closed-source applications in general.

I think you mean to say "It's different from what I'm used to and it's closed-source, therefore I hate it."

Re:Not every switcher falls in love

[Dragon of the Pants]

You obviously didn't give it much of a chance. You can put the dock on the left, right, or bottom of the screen, AND you can have it hidden except when you bring your cursor to the side of the screen where it is located. It's a LOT better and more efficient than the Windows taskbar in pretty much every way imaginable.

Re:It wasn't that unbalanced.

[Fred_A]

I keep hearing this I don't get what the problem with 512 Megs is on Mac OS. My iBook has 512 Megs and runs fine. I mostly run Firefox, terminal, text editors and OOo (in X) on it (at the same time even) and never really felt memory constrained. OTOH if I had known beforehand how much disk space OS X eats, I wouldn't have gotten a 30GB model. Of course if you're going to do heavy graphics work, or simulation, or somesuch, things might be different, but it's not really platform specific...

This being said, and while OS X mostly runs fine despite a few annoying bugs (no showstoppers), I still find KDE way more comfortable to use. Notably because of much better network integration and the fact that windows don't have to be in front to get focus (none of this is really KDE specific though, more a Unix desktop thing).

Re:stay tuned, I'm waiting for my new mini

[TubeSteak]

Your IT guy doesn't know what he is talking about. Burning discs at an ultra low speed will not necessarily make the quality of the burn better, and it may even make it worse.

Nowadays, you're mostly correct, but the conventional wisdom was always slower = better, mostly because the faster you burn, the more errors are introduced.

Anyone who really cares should be willing to sacrifice a few discs to burn them at different speeds, then check the results with any of a variety of programs.