Crossing over soon, another PC to Mac switcher

Okay doakay I'm doing it soon, I'm buying a MacBook Pro. I had already decided, when Apple began using Intel chips, that when I replace my PC it would be with a Mac.

With the latest upgrades to the MBP line, I'm ready now.

I have a couple of questions:

1) Would you recommend that I get a book to help migrate all my PC stuff to the Mac (I am not a novice, so Robin William's "The Little Mac Book" is too elementary) - maybe one of David Pogue's books? Which one?

2) What hard drive? (I have read posts on this forum that HD rotational speed is a critical factor in performance, but I have seen studies that show drive storage capacity can be as important as rotational speed). In terms of PC performance, my experience is that a lot of things affect performance before HD rotational speed.

Here's what I'm looking at:

15-inch 2.4GHz MBP w/ 4GB memory and ???GB Drive @ ????rpm

(I will also get an Apple 23" flat panel. Surely a mighty mouse too. Maybe some other stuff).

Thanks

Bryan

I switched in early Dec. of last year after 20+ years of PCs. I bought a MBP with 120 GB drive and 2 GB RAM. I use it with an external Samsung 21.3" LCD, an Apple Blue Tooth keyboard and a Logitech cordless mouse. I supplemented the 120 GB drive with an external Western Digital 500 GB drive with firewire 800 connection. I absolutely love this machine. It is rock solid, fast and elegant. I have Parallels and XP installed but only use it for Visual Studio which I have to use for work. Photoshop CS2 was fairly slow, but no slower than it was on my PC. PS CS3 is very fast. I've now switched my whole family over to Macs.
--
-Rich

bryandixon said:

Okay doakay I'm doing it soon, I'm buying a MacBook Pro. I had
already decided, when Apple began using Intel chips, that when I
replace my PC it would be with a Mac.

With the latest upgrades to the MBP line, I'm ready now.

I have a couple of questions:

1) Would you recommend that I get a book to help migrate all my PC
stuff to the Mac (I am not a novice, so Robin William's "The Little
Mac Book" is too elementary) - maybe one of David Pogue's books?
Which one?

2) What hard drive? (I have read posts on this forum that HD
rotational speed is a critical factor in performance, but I have
seen studies that show drive storage capacity can be as important
as rotational speed). In terms of PC performance, my experience is
that a lot of things affect performance before HD rotational speed.

Here's what I'm looking at:

15-inch 2.4GHz MBP w/ 4GB memory and ???GB Drive @ ????rpm

(I will also get an Apple 23" flat panel. Surely a mighty mouse
too. Maybe some other stuff).

Thanks

Bryan

Click to expand...

And the book to buy is Pogue's "Switching to the Mac," though there is plenty of switching info on the Apple web site.
--
-Rich

I'm the first Mac purchaser in my family, I bought my PowerMac G5 dual-core 2.3Ghz machine last January and haven't looked back. The machine has 2.6GB of RAM, and I've upgraded it to include two 500GB hard drives internally, along with the original 250GB drive in an external Firewire 400 enclosure.

Next up is one of the new 15" Macbook Pros which will run rings around my PowerMac for some jobs.

I've also convinced my brother to go for a Mac the next time around, most likely a 24" iMac once they upgrade those machines. Next up, my mother...

You will find that when setting up the machine that you are prompted to transfer info from your PC - it's fairly straightforward. After about 1 week you will find you also need David Pogue's Mac OSX: The Missing Manual - it's the one they say should be included in the box alongside the machine. Heaps of delightful tips await your discovery. Enjoy

waveney

After 20+ years with Windows, finally made the switch to an iMac about a year ago. You'll never look back. Pogue's book is helpful, but Apple's series of information papers and the Apple forums are really all you're likely to need. For good reason, Apple's site has lots of stuff about moving over. The best thing about the switch (other than never seeing the BSOD again) is finding the little things which return some fun to computing.

Give Aperture a try, too. One sweet app.

Terry

Get your memory from somewhere other than the Apple Store. OWC has 2 GB modules for $118.

Rich,

Recently I've been looking into switching to Mac. Being an engineering type, I'm looking for more information on why it is/isn't better than an XP based machine--particularly in areas of performance, reliability, flexibility, efficiency, etc. Facts persuade me, not clever advertising puffery. Since you recently went down this road, could you refer met to the articles or websites that were most convincing to you? Thanks.

--
Doug Murphy

I second that, it is real easy to add RAM, Apple is really expensive on RAM. Check OWC, Crucial, etc.

Prices are looking pretty good, and Apple doesn't fluctuate with their RAM prices.
--
Photography and Graphic Design
Portfolio - http://www.atlanticexpressinc.com
Prints - http://www.atlanticexpressions.com

i would get the biggest 7200 rpm you can afford, or get the cheapest and check prices online and change for a bigger one yourself

do not buy an mighty mouse, i love all things apple but the mighty mouse kind off sucks, i had 2 broke down and one that didn't work from the start, i would advice to try it in a mac store first, maybe if yoiu really like it, but i replaced all my mice with cheap logitech mice. (less than 20$), even when my mighty mouse did work i like the logitech better

My initial reaction to the mighty mouse was negative, but after a couple of days I found it to be so much better than my MS Intellimouse. I actually had both plugged into the USB ports at the same time on my Mac Pro and used them in the same app. No question, the Mighty mouse is definitely better, for me at least. For photoshop work though, I highly recommend a Wacom tablet.

You might also consider as an alternative to the 23" Cinema Display an NEC LCD2470WNX. It's 24", sells for under $800 shipped, and is likely even higher quality than the ACD. The ACD's not bad, but my NEC 1970NX is slightly more neutral, and my 2190UX is noticeably more neutral, smoother, and yields a better gamma. If you're doing photo retouching, don't forget a calibrator. I like the Gretag-Macbeth Eye-One Display, which has gotten good reviews and performs better than most on laptop screens as well.

--
'No matter where you go, there you are.'

Doug, I find most PC users are like you - they suspect the reason users switched to macs was because of marketing puffery. I also find that most people that get do switch were very skeptical and cynical before they did, thought about it for a long time, did a little bit of homework, and decided the mac was worthy of purchase. You've done a good thing by asking here, and here are some other things you can do or consider:

1) Go to an Apple Store and play with the machines. They won't rush you out, either.

2) Read PC Magazine and Consumer Reports - I doubt they are Apple fans. They also publish annual surverys on quality and support - Apple tends to win handily, even at PC Mag.

3) If you've lost data to malware (I did, with an AV, 3 spyware catchers and 2 firewalls running), going to a "good"site that had been temporarily hijacked, you may enjoy a platform that, to date, has very few issues in that regard
4) Try it. Amazon still has a 30 day return policy.

5) Minimize some risk, if you're concerned about your PC investment, by getting Parallels Desktop to run Windows in a window on your mac. You can run your existing PC programs there, if you need to. I do this to connect to my corporate network which uses a vpn that isn't mac friendly.

6) Just do a google search on Vista vs. OS X. There were tons of comparisons written when Vista was launched. I think OS X came out look fairly well, and that may be a kind assessment. Let me point out there is nothing like the registry In OS X.

7) Apple hardware is like that in any PC now, from cpus to USB2 ports - so no risk there. The difference is in the software, OS, etc. I can't give you any data that suggests OS X is more stable, but ask around here for opinions. There are many of us that use both every day. I can say that I have anywhere up to 14 apps open at a time, and reboot my laptop maybe once every 20-30 days... and I carry it to work every day. I have had maybe 2 os crashes in the last 4 years. I think it was due to a bad stick of memory. But that's just me, and I may be atypical.

8) Macs aren't perfect, but if you do try it, I seriously doubt you will want to switch back.

I also have been a PC user for years. I don't like the RAM limitations
and seeming flakiness of most solutions to this problem.
So I am thinking of getting of Mac Pro (not sure what config yet).

Problem is all my software is Windows (of course). My question is do
CS3 plugins need to be specially compiled for the Mac?

How effective is it to run a simulated version of windows?

Will software vendors let you change your licence from
Windows to Mac?

Has anyone regretted changing?

Does anyone go for dual boot?

mattsea said:

How effective is it to run a simulated version of windows?

Click to expand...

Just to clarify, there are no Windows "simulations" on OS X. Boot Camp lets you boot into a real installation of Windows. Parallels and VMware allow you to run Windows simultaneously with OS X. In all cases, you're running a full, licensed version of Windows directly through the Intel CPUs without any emulation layer. With Boot Camp, Windows runs at native speed. With Parallels and VMware, Windows runs at or very close to native speed.

This is not like the bad old days of VirtualPC, where Windows was run through a CPU emulator at substantially reduced speeds. This is the beauty of Apple's adoption of Intel processors. The current Windows-on-Mac solutions give you the full performance that the Intel processors are capable of delivering, and that includes high-end games.

--
'No matter where you go, there you are.'

bryandixon said:

2) What hard drive? (I have read posts on this forum that HD
rotational speed is a critical factor in performance, but I have
seen studies that show drive storage capacity can be as important
as rotational speed). In terms of PC performance, my experience is
that a lot of things affect performance before HD rotational speed.

Click to expand...

Excluding the optical drive, the HDD is the slowest component in a computer, so you would feel the speed gain when writing, searching, opening, coping files, etc, if you go for a 7200rpm hard drive.

PS: Avoid the MightyMouse... Go for a Logitech MX400 (wired) of for a Logitech MX/VX Revolution (wireless). Huge difference in comfort. Or wait until the next Apple mouse, which will replace the scroll ball with a tiny touchpad (according to one of their many patents).

Performance

My MacBook has the same specs as my old WinXP machine, but absolutel flies along even with lots of applications open (I mean 10 - 15, loads more than I would ever have even tried on XP). Photoshop CS3 also seems to be much quicker on my Mac, depsite the lack of dedicated scratch disk and RAID0 array compared to the XP machine.

Reliability

I work in a computational chemistry laboratory, and we are replacing all of our existing machines with Macs (slowly but surely!). We are putting boxes through their paces doing complex calculations, often spanning several days, whilst simultaneously using them for everyday email, presentations, writing papers etc. We need machines which will stay up and cope admirably when we throw slightly less-than-perfect code at them! The Macs do this. Linux copes OK. We don't use XP at all.

Flexibility

The other reason we like Macs is because a lot of academic / scientific software is free, and tends to be developed for Unix. With the Mac, we can run all the Unix / Linux applications we could when we just had Linux boxes, but get all the advantages of Mac OS X. In addition, Im running Parallels on mine with excellent response in terms of speed and no problems or glitches so far at all. That seems like the ultimate in flexibility to me!

Efficiency

All the little things which make working in OS X such a nice experience make you far more efficient in terms of your working. The fact that so much software is included, and just works straight away, means you can accomplish tasks far more easily and quickly. And the power of having Unix under the bonnet means you can do some amazing stuff from the comfort of a well designed, mature front end.

For me, no marketing puffery. It is the fact that I can now run on a Mac those Windows programs that have no Mac equivalent (or no equivalents that I like anyway).

I'm not sure why Apple went Intel, maybe Motorola could not keep up with the processor speed race. But the bonus for Apple is that I do believe a lot of PC users will now consider a Mac for the same reason I am buying one (tomorrow I do it).

I've always liked the Mac look and feel, and even though recent versions of Windows has got close, they don't quite get it.

galactusofmyth said:

Doug, I find most PC users are like you - they suspect the reason
users switched to macs was because of marketing puffery. >

Click to expand...

Thanks for all the feed back ladies and gents.

I go to the Apple store tomorrow.

Bryan

Rich, how does Visual Studio work for you? I'm considering the same configuration and would have the same work requirement. I develop in Visual Studio both locally and off a server depending on which client environment I'm in. Have you encountered any difficulties?

John