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Western CO | We switched the entire family to Macs over the past 6 months or so. 3 Mac mini's and an iMac. Everything Dave says about the GUI is absolutely correct.
Just a little background first, I'd be labeled a "propeller head" (as Dave says), I'm an EE that returned to farming so I'm pretty comfortable with computers and have run a bunch of different systems (long enough to remember the days of flipping 5.25" floppys over so that we had a "doublesided" drive -- and actually back to 8" floppys). But if you can run Windoze, you will not have a problem with the "learning curve" going to a Mac. Apple has always had the best GUI.
Here's my thoughts on the switch -- I wouldn't go back to PC's and Vista if you gave them to me. Things just work seamlessly on a Mac -- granted I have no experience with Vista but I don't expect it to be a "great leap" forward. Yes the prices are higher, or may seem to be -- as Dave pointed out the Intel processors that Apple is using are the Core 2 Duo family. Currently I don't have much PC specific software so I don't really have that issue, I have MS Office for Mac and Quickbooks. BTW, I like the Mac version of Office better than the PC version. My wife has the biggest problems, she has an office in town and can't switch there so she is stuck going back and forth. We have installed parallels (the virtualization software that Dave mentioned) on her mini so she can run windows applications here. So far parallels has worked pretty good for us -- it's just a little wierd running XP in a window of Mac OS.
Networking, printers, music (we got started down this path with iPods) it all just works without having to jump through any of MS's hoops. One thing that absolutely drives me nuts about Windows is the fact that MS basically assumes the user to be incapable of making changes to the system without the system "nannying" the user to death. I despise the fact that when you make changes in msconfig that you ALWAYS get the window "warning" you that you have made changes to the startup configuration and even if you click the "don't show me this window again" button it will pop up every time you make changes. I just love the new Mac tv ad that has the Vista security guy in it. I can imagine MS making you "confirm" or "deny" every action you make that is outside the systems "nanny" borders.
As far as upgrading, I can't tell you much there over what Dave mentioned. The Macs do have USB ports as well, so many "add-ons" can be accomplished that way -- Memory being the obvious one that couldn't. I've never been a really big fan of all-in-one units like the iMac but for the price point it was the best way for me to go. I have a 20", 2GB of ram, 250 G hard drive. One nice thing about the packaging is that it doesn't take up much space.
I haven't done much with the video yet but I was impressed with the fact that I could hook up my digital Sony camcorder (reading an older analog tape) to iMovie and easily get video and editing functions.
I nearly replied to a comment last week in the thread below about sound drivers and windows (or how to get rid of them) -- pretty easy actually -- buy a Mac. But I thought a useless smart reply was probably not what they wanted to hear ;-)
I did get a chance to play with a couple of Vista machines in the store last week. I heard that they implemented several "Mac OS like" functions and wanted to see what it was like. It's sort of like the old saying "The most sincere form of flattery is copying" -- well MS has got that down I guess.
HTH
Gary | |
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Mac or Vista
