Thinking Of Switching Over To Mac

[WebBangkok]

Hi all,

I have sort of had it up to here (above my head) with my PC laptops.

I got 3 PC laptops over the last year and a half (call it my obsession) and they are starting to bore me.

I am thinking of going Mac now, I might keep one laptop just for my road trips.

So, give me some pro's and cons about the latest mac book pro's.....

[bkkjames]

I have an old Toshiba notebook at home and use a mac mini in the office. No question I would rather have a Mac a home too. Saving money though for more important things, like a Wildtrak, then my son's education lol

[submaniac]

Cons: Macs are <deleted>' expensive compared to PC's. Granted they do use alot of the high tech stuff in their machines, but still expensive. The Macs are using the same intel chips as the PC's. Really, the only difference is the software. So if you want to do the mac thing you could just use a PC and install the OS (which btw Moderators is freely available for sale to the public so I am not advocating anything illegal) on a PC and have a "Hackintosh".

[WebBangkok]

Cons: Macs are <deleted>' expensive compared to PC's. Granted they do use alot of the high tech stuff in their machines, but still expensive. The Macs are using the same intel chips as the PC's. Really, the only difference is the software. So if you want to do the mac thing you could just use a PC and install the OS (which btw Moderators is freely available for sale to the public so I am not advocating anything illegal) on a PC and have a "Hackintosh".

Yes I know about the Hackintosh, but its just not my style.

I might just stick my my PC laptop, but I might as well just sell the other 2 laptops as they are only about a year old each and buy myself a mac with the money.

[nullx8]

The Price-tag is not really a con!

Apple is simply the best OEM manufacturer.

Good stuff costs money!

Everything comes from one place, well tested and controlled, that efforts are e xpensive and reflecting to the slightly higher price.

In the end they actually much cheaper, because you spend alot more time with "do things" and zero time "fighting the Operating System".

The real Con's are that mac's and the operatingsystems are strict in standards and the way they work.

Resulting in some things may simply not work due the counterpart dies not exactly meet the requirements.

As example some websites badly programmed may not show the winsows experience.

But because of this the machine stays healty and sinply works.

I have serval macs (including the whole iMac Family) the oldest one is 12Years old and still works like on day 1.

So the cost is not really a factor.

Also i dont know anyone who seriously use a Computer switched back to Windows

But i know alot of peoples moving from problems to success using a Macintosh as Tool for it.

[nullx8]

Cons: Macs are <deleted>' expensive compared to PC's.

Not really.

The best non-apple Oem manufacturer is clearly HP, a standard pc costs about 12000 baht.

A mac mini goes for 19000 but is only 10% the physical size, faster, use hdmi, much higher quality hardware is used, and they work (even with windows)

The100 Bucks difference is burned very quickly on service and chopping gray hairs of horror fighting Windows, upgrades for the next update, antivirussoftware, and the operating system purchase (macs always come with the lastest OS in a Package)

Just legally buying Windows would make the Mac cheaper already.

[nikster]

Two standout deals. MacBook Air is amazingly light and tiny, yet plenty fast, the latest comes with 8GB RAM and a Core i7 so you can actually use it for serious work. Main reason I didn't get one is that I need a large screen.

Then there's the retina MacBook Pro. You have to take it on faith a little because the retina display isn't as obvious an improvement as you would think.

When I first looked at it I thought, wow, this is a seriously good display. But nothing more - my previous MacBook Pro also had a great display. As do most high end laptops and Macs in particular. Same with other people I show it to. They either say they can't see the difference, or they're only mildly impressed. It's not something apparent in 5 minutes.

But after a few days of working with it, something shifts... you start noticing that you've actually never seen text this sharp on a computer screen. It's like a little piece of the future, and if you work with text (who doesnt) it's simply amazing. You'll never go back. This screen is crazy sharp. An unexpected consequence is also that you can run it in scaled modes at 1680 and even 1920 logical pixels, and it's just as sharp and awesome as at the native 1440x.

So I'd recommend this to anyone. Clearly all laptops will have screens like this in a number of years. There is no going back, and I would also not now get a MacBook Air with standard display. This makes all other displays look like crap.

Expensive is in the eye of the beholder. When I bought my 17" MacBook Pro 3 years ago, it cost $3,000 (including 3 year warranty, which is a must for Macs). Was that a lot? I tried to compare it with PCs around at the time but there were no comparable PCs - there was no PC laptop the size of a 15" Dell, with a 17" screen, at 3.5kg weight, with 8 hour battery life. The only 17" PCs were gaming monsters weighing nearly twice as much and with a 2 hour battery life.

Same with this one - there is no quad Core-i7 PC laptop that weighs 2kg, let alone one with a retina display. Compared to other MacBook Pros, the retina is a steal. The same configuration with SSD on a retina is actually cheaper than the standard, the SSD making up most of the extra cost.

As for the standard MacBook Pros they are usually also relatively peerless, so people compare them to some cheap Dell with the same processor, ignoring build quality, battery life, screen quality, weight, etc, and then conclude they're expensive. The thing is PC makers don't make very many high end laptops - they are focused on selling $600 cheapo specials and compete on price.

Compare ultrabooks to the MacBook Air you'll find the MacBook Air pretty price competitive.

All that said, I am not trying to convince anyone to go to Mac. That ship has sailed. I can't stand Windows so for me even if a PC company comes out with a nice hardware design, Windows is like a ball and chain, and it's not one of the options. But yeah if you want something really novel, doesn't get better than the retina MacBook Pro. Typing this on one, it's amazing. 2800x1800 pixels...

Edited July 24, 2012 by nikster

[JakeBKK]

So you gout bored? submaniac is not necessarily right, you can buy a macbook air from round about 30 k baht - that is the same price range a good business notebook ( i7) would go for..If you aiming for a new experience, a cheap way to try something new would be to install unbuntu together with macbuntutu on one of your existing notebooks. Mac os is a unix based system as well as unbuntu is. Without looking into the settings, you hardly can tell: this is not mac os!

Take a look at the picture:

You can try it out, if you like it - go for the real deal. Unbuntu and macbuntu are free.

Edited July 24, 2012 by JakeBKK

[JakeBKK]

The Price-tag is not really a con!

Apple is simply the best OEM manufacturer.

Good stuff costs money!

Everything comes from one place, well tested and controlled, that efforts are e xpensive and reflecting to the slightly higher price.

In the end they actually much cheaper, because you spend alot more time with "do things" and zero time "fighting the Operating System".

The real Con's are that mac's and the operatingsystems are strict in standards and the way they work.

Resulting in some things may simply not work due the counterpart dies not exactly meet the requirements.

As example some websites badly programmed may not show the winsows experience.

But because of this the machine stays healty and sinply works.

I have serval macs (including the whole iMac Family) the oldest one is 12Years old and still works like on day 1.

So the cost is not really a factor.

Also i dont know anyone who seriously use a Computer switched back to Windows

But i know alot of peoples moving from problems to success using a Macintosh as Tool for it.

The worst thing ever is to own a mac pro and run windows on it. If you switch from windows, you will take some time to get used to the " mac experience " It is totally worth it !

[mogandave]

I've run both Macs and PCs for years and they are both fine for what they do, saying one is better than another is like saying blondes are better than red-heads.

I wish Apple would get away from the aluminum housings on the MacBooks and sell me an extra (or replacement) battery I can change out as I see fit.

Price wise, I think the only reason people think Macs are more expensive than PCs is because there are no low-end Macs. When you compare comparable hardware, the Mac is pretty competitive. For home use anyway, and assuming you pay for your software, and you're not buying a sh*t-grade PC, I think the Mac is actually cheaper.

Personally, I don't see Apple hardware as being any more reliable than decent PC hardware. The software may be a little less glitzy, but it is certainly not perfect.

My next big Apple purchase will be a touch-screen laptop. I think with that I'd finally have a reason get away from the PC altogether.

[Payboy]

My next big Apple purchase will be a touch-screen laptop. I think with that I'd finally have a reason get away from the PC altogether.

Didn't know Apple has one in the works. I thought they didn't do that because of fear it would eat into the iPad market.

[gudtymchuk]

I switched from PC to Mac about 3 years ago after replacing a PC laptop about every 18 months. Now still using the same Mac Pro for almost 3 years without one single glitch. I am now a happy Mac convert.

[mogandave]

My next big Apple purchase will be a touch-screen laptop. I think with that I'd finally have a reason get away from the PC altogether.

Didn't know Apple has one in the works. I thought they didn't do that because of fear it would eat into the iPad market.

I don't know that they are either, but they're fools if they're not. A touch-screen desktop should be in the works as well.

I'm guessing touch screen MacBook Pros at $2,500-$5,000 a pop eating into the $500-$800 iPad market would not be much of a problem.

[richsilver]

Let's talk about desktops.

I have been a PC user since Windows 3.1 and have used every version of Windows since then. I have been trying Windows 8 on a partition on my hard drive and I hate it. Of course I can stick with Windows 7 for quite some time, but I'm thinking maybe it's time to go with Apple.

My reasons: I'm on my third iPhone and I have an iPad. I'm quite happy with them. Most of my work is done on the Internet, so the only frequently used software is Microsoft Office (which is available for the Mac).

Price is not an issue for me and I'm considering the purchase of a 27" iMac (I have a 26" Samsung monitor now). My main concern is that Apple will introduce a new iMac soon and I'll suddenly feel I've wasted a ton of money. With a PC it's easy to do some fairly major upgrades, but not so with a Mac -- you have to start over. USB 3.0 is real important to me and I would love to have a sold state hard drive.

Can I have some thoughts pro and con, including some suggestions where I might buy an iMac and get good service and help.

[nikster]

I wish Apple would get away from the aluminum housings on the MacBooks and sell me an extra (or replacement) battery I can change out as I see fit.

I see that you'd want that - but wouldn't you rather want more battery life out of a non-user-replaceable battery? That's the trade-off that Apple made - use the room normally used for latches, mechanisms, battery casings - and fill it with battery.

The battery is replaceable and Apple will actually replace it over the entire 3 year extended warranty period should it break. No PC maker warrants a battery for more than one year. Took them a while but newer Mac batteries actually do last the promised 5 years or 1000 charge cycles. My old MBP was on its second battery - first one replaced after 2 years as it held less than 80% charge. Second one now has 490 charge cycles and is on 92% health. Compared to the past, that's amazing - a battery was usually considered dead after 300 cycles or 2 years.

I think Apple made the right trade-off there. A bit of out of the box thinking. The other thing about 2 batteries is that it's really a border case. In order to use 2 batteries comfortably, you also need an external charger - otherwise you end up having to schedule when your batteries charge inside the computer so you've bought yourself a little logistics problem along with the battery. As I found out when I once bought a 2nd battery for my first MacBook Pro I ended up never using the second battery, it was too much of a hassle.

Edited July 24, 2012 by nikster

[nikster]

Let's talk about desktops.

I have been a PC user since Windows 3.1 and have used every version of Windows since then. I have been trying Windows 8 on a partition on my hard drive and I hate it. Of course I can stick with Windows 7 for quite some time, but I'm thinking maybe it's time to go with Apple.

My reasons: I'm on my third iPhone and I have an iPad. I'm quite happy with them. Most of my work is done on the Internet, so the only frequently used software is Microsoft Office (which is available for the Mac).

Price is not an issue for me and I'm considering the purchase of a 27" iMac (I have a 26" Samsung monitor now). My main concern is that Apple will introduce a new iMac soon and I'll suddenly feel I've wasted a ton of money. With a PC it's easy to do some fairly major upgrades, but not so with a Mac -- you have to start over. USB 3.0 is real important to me and I would love to have a sold state hard drive.

Can I have some thoughts pro and con, including some suggestions where I might buy an iMac and get good service and help.

IMO with an iMac you have to bite the bullet and go with a high end version. The most amazing one is the one with SSD + HDD - they'll put the operating system and applications on the SSD for you, and everything else on the HDD and you'll get both the speed of the SSD and the space of the HDD. A friend of mine has this setup, 27", quad i7, SSD+HDD. Blazingly fast. But it costs you.

The iMac is gorgeous - just bought a 2008 one for the wife and it looks like it's brand new, all high quality materials and such. It's ageless.

The one thing that pisses me off about the iMac is that you have to take the whole thing apart to upgrade the HDD though, and that unfortunately still holds true even for the newest ones. On a laptop, I don't mind - but a desktop can easily last 5 years, and easily more if one could upgrade the HDD, so making that non-user upgradeable is very annoying. Ok so the new ones at least have thunderbolt ports and USB 3 so you could connect whatever large external HDDs you want a few years down the road, with no loss of speed.

It's the only downside though. My "new" 4 year old iMac got a 24" IPS panel - its still gorgeous even today.

Here's the definite site as to whether there are iMac updates imminent - and it looks like there are, so you might want to wait with the purchase! iMac has a "don't buy" rating right now!

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#iMac

Correction: iMac doesn't even have USB 3 yet, so definitely wait with that.

Edited July 24, 2012 by nikster

[samuijimmy]

Another yes for Mac, I think enough said by other posters why!!!

[mikewet88]

Another yes for Mac too.

Converted last year. Owned a Macbook Pro 13 (2011). Was plan to wait for new iMac27 (need more powerfully Mac for work and gaming). But the refresh is delay till who know when.

Then goes for Hackintosh route. Z77 motherboard, core i7 3770, 16Gb ram, SSD, ati6870. Got LAN, BT, wifi worked like charm. Used Apple Wireless kb and Magic mouse for 100% Mac experience. This pc will last me next 1-2 year. But will definitely buy an iMac sometime in future for my wife

Edited July 24, 2012 by mikewet88

[DonaldBattles]

Apple is light years away from anything that Windows puts out. I have been using 4 apple products for 3 years and would never go back to the old desk top anchors. Failure of apple or virus never enters your mind. Having a 2 teriit backup drive plus IClound keeps me from worrying about any data loss.

[Traxster]

Of course if you have been 'Windows' person for some years it may take you a while to get used to the 'Apple' way of doing things,

but hang in there because it is definitely worth it !

[Toxane]

Used Windows (and others) since v3.1. Switched to Apple/Mac/OSX two months ago. Got a 11" MacBook Air & 15" MacBook Pro. Creativity boost within the first minutes of using OSX. Seriously.

[mogandave]

I wish Apple would get away from the aluminum housings on the MacBooks and sell me an extra (or replacement) battery I can change out as I see fit.

I see that you'd want that - but wouldn't you rather want more battery life out of a non-user-replaceable battery? That's the trade-off that Apple made - use the room normally used for latches, mechanisms, battery casings - and fill it with battery.

The battery is replaceable and Apple will actually replace it over the entire 3 year extended warranty period should it break. No PC maker warrants a battery for more than one year. Took them a while but newer Mac batteries actually do last the promised 5 years or 1000 charge cycles. My old MBP was on its second battery - first one replaced after 2 years as it held less than 80% charge. Second one now has 490 charge cycles and is on 92% health. Compared to the past, that's amazing - a battery was usually considered dead after 300 cycles or 2 years.

I think Apple made the right trade-off there. A bit of out of the box thinking. The other thing about 2 batteries is that it's really a border case. In order to use 2 batteries comfortably, you also need an external charger - otherwise you end up having to schedule when your batteries charge inside the computer so you've bought yourself a little logistics problem along with the battery. As I found out when I once bought a 2nd battery for my first MacBook Pro I ended up never using the second battery, it was too much of a hassle.

I like a back-up battery so that I can use one when I’m docked and charging all the time and save the other to use as a back-up and when I’m traveling. The less you charge them the longer they last. That said, battery technology has come a long way for all manufacturers, not just Apple. I think my Dell laptop battery lasts longer than my MBP, but it’s hard to tell as I use them for different things.

I do not think Apple got away from the replaceable battery to improve performance, but rather to facilitate the aluminum case. My last MB had the Al case and a replaceable battery and it was easy to see what a service/warranty nightmare that must have been. Actually, the Al bothers me more than the non-replaceable battery. That said, it does look bitchin’ so I don’t imagine it’s going anywhere soon. If Apple offered a 13” MBP with SSD, touch-screen and carbon-fiber housing for $5K, all I’d need to know is where to sign….

As far as reliability, (IMO) far and away most laptop hardware failures are hard-drive, and Apple buys theirs from the same guys everyone else does.

[nikster]

As far as reliability, (IMO) far and away most laptop hardware failures are hard-drive, and Apple buys theirs from the same guys everyone else does.

I guess you've never had an Acer

Ok admittedly I probably got a lemon that time but my last acer... wow... everything on it broke. The latch, the screen, the logic board, and yeah also the hard drive two times

You must be one of the few and the proud who actually have two batteries - your use case "almost always plugged in, using second battery on travels only" is a good one. Doesn't apply to me, but if you do that then you don't have the logistics nightmare that I had when I had two batteries (charging over night should I get up in the middle of the night and swap batteries to keep both charged??). But even if your case two batteries is not a daily use solution.

I do have some experience with HDD Failures and honestly the case design of a laptop is very important here, more so than the brand of HDD used. Before the unibody macs got really hot and that would kill the HDD often. Just want to point that out, I don't think any of the major laptop makers have issues there.

[bubba]

The best solution to travelling notebooks and mechanical HDD failures is a notebook with a solid state drive (SSD). That's why I bought a MacBook Air. You also get the advantage of very fast disk access, and my total boot up time is less than 15 seconds.

[mogandave]

As far as reliability, (IMO) far and away most laptop hardware failures are hard-drive, and Apple buys theirs from the same guys everyone else does.

I guess you've never had an Acer

Ok admittedly I probably got a lemon that time but my last acer... wow... everything on it broke. The latch, the screen, the logic board, and yeah also the hard drive two times

You must be one of the few and the proud who actually have two batteries - your use case "almost always plugged in, using second battery on travels only" is a good one. Doesn't apply to me, but if you do that then you don't have the logistics nightmare that I had when I had two batteries (charging over night should I get up in the middle of the night and swap batteries to keep both charged??). But even if your case two batteries is not a daily use solution.

I do have some experience with HDD Failures and honestly the case design of a laptop is very important here, more so than the brand of HDD used. Before the unibody macs got really hot and that would kill the HDD often. Just want to point that out, I don't think any of the major laptop makers have issues there.

My last MB had the aluminum case and the HD went south after about a year and a half. My new (8 months) MBP does not seem to run any cooler than the last one. Actually, the Al cases could well run cooler, but they do certainly seem hotter in your lap than the plastic. Both my Al Macs seem hotter than any of the plastic case units I’ve had including my current Dell. It would be interesting to test the exhaust and surface temperature of both when running similar tasks.

I’ve had no fewer than ten laptops in the last 15 years and I don't think the heat gets the hard drives, I think it's the banging around.

[HardenedSoul]

I, too, am considering making the move to Mac but am a little wary of the usefulness of this Retina display malarkey.

I mean, I'm no expert on this kinda stuff but Blu Ray is the highest definition you can get for movies at the moment, right?

Now a full 1080p Blu Ray movie can take up to 50GB of space, right?

That's 20% of the space available on the 250GB SSD. It'd be fair to say that any video file with a higher resolution will obviously take up much more space so that raises questions about the display's relevance when mobile and not connected to an external hard drive with much greater capacity. What is the actual real-world benefit or point of having resolution that very few developers or content providers are adopting just yet. Won't there be a problem with accessing super-high-res content wirelessly considering 300Mbps is the typical limit for most Wireless-N routers and many people do have trouble streaming Blu Ray wirelessly?

I read someone had a bit of a nightmare installing Microsoft Office and other bits and pieces thanks to the omission of the optical drive. It all sounds like a step backward in terms of convenience but maybe someone can assuage my fears.

[negreanu]

1080p movies from itunes store about 5-6GB due to newer version of h264 used.

Handbrake the bluray file to reduce the size. You wont really notice the difference.

Edited July 31, 2012 by negreanu

[nikster]

If you rely on MS office then maybe wait until a retina version is out before getting a retina display.

Most everything else is fine, real Mac apps are all being updated and look gorgeous. There won't be movies with this high a resolution out there for a while, I don't think - 1080p is plenty.

It's for images and text mostly. As for the web looking like crap, no it doesn't. Even sites that have not been updated look way better thanks to crisp text like from a very good laser printer. It's a huge improvement. Pictures look better than ever as well - the downside is that you'll suddenly be able to very easily tell which pictures were shot with your iPhone camera, and which with a proper DSLR.

Example here on this page the various ads look low-res and blurry; but the text everywhere is super sharp. The ads look just as low res on a normal display, only it doesn't stick out because everything else is also low res. That is the pictures look just as they did before, you just notice how bad they really are

Edited July 31, 2012 by nikster

[tominbkk]

Let's talk about desktops.

I have been a PC user since Windows 3.1 and have used every version of Windows since then. I have been trying Windows 8 on a partition on my hard drive and I hate it. Of course I can stick with Windows 7 for quite some time, but I'm thinking maybe it's time to go with Apple.

My reasons: I'm on my third iPhone and I have an iPad. I'm quite happy with them. Most of my work is done on the Internet, so the only frequently used software is Microsoft Office (which is available for the Mac).

That was my case about a year ago: I have been using iPods iPhones and iPads for a few years already. When it was time to get a new laptop, I finally broke down and got myself a good MacBook Pro. I do i a lot of video editing, music production, and photo editing as well on my computer so I wanted something nice and strong. I know that you can get that kind of computer in Windows format, but I really wanted to see what the Mac could do. I have to say I'm very happy with its performance as it never even broke a sweat no matter what I threw at it.

I would say it took me about a month and a half to fully get used to the Mac experience. And then took me another few months to really get used to everything that is different about the Mac and how it makes computing really fun and intuitive. Being a Windows guy since 1992, this is understandable. I never really understood what people were always raving about as far as Macintosh goes, but now I understand.

I say that if you are in the market for a new computer, you really can't go wrong with a Mac. The quality of the product in Windows laptop terms will probably mean a comparable price as well.

[ExpatJ]

Webbkk- don't change! I switched from PC to a mac 1 year ago and it was a terrible decision. Mac OS software is really NOT user friendly compared to windows among the delights you will enjoy are downloading documents and then spending way to long trying to discover where exactly they were downloaded too, horrible apply mac mouses (worst design ever), 'search' file system that doesnt actually search the whole mac system. Overall i was extremely happy to move back to a PC.