Thinking Of Switching Over To Mac

[JimShortz]

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.

Congrats on post 1,000; and I agree you can keep your macs... I just can't buy into that whole closed ecosystem.

[tominbkk]

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.

1. Downloads go to the "download" folder unless you indicate otherwise.

2. Command-Space brings up the 'spotlight' function. Type what you are looking for and it will (extremely quickly) search you entire computer. Sort your results out however you want. Every folder as well has 'search' in the upper right of the window. Click on that and you can search the folder.

On the notebooks the trackpad is intuitive and highly functional, creating a fluid navigational experience unparalleled by my 20 years of working with Windows.

Not sure what kind of Mac you were using?

[tominbkk]

Congrats on post 1,000; and I agree you can keep your macs... I just can't buy into that whole closed ecosystem.

Not quite sure what you mean by that. Organised and logical, yes. Closed? In what way?

[nikster]

Congrats on post 1,000; and I agree you can keep your macs... I just can't buy into that whole closed ecosystem.

Not quite sure what you mean by that. Organised and logical, yes. Closed? In what way?

Must be running Linux.. other than that OS X is certainly more open - with an open source core - than Windows...

[DonaldBattles]

Switching to Mac is not for everyone. People who grew up on Windows will have trouble opening their minds to other operating systems. I switched to Mac 3 years ago for all of my business and it is the best move I ever made for some of the following reasons:

1. More flexible.

2. Hardware reliability.

3. Windows and Microsoft Office can be installed on Mac and two programs can be open at the same time. Therefore you do not loose any of your old Office Documents.

4. The last few issues of Windows has been a new set of problems and complications.

5. The future of storage and rental programs is going to be in the cloud. ICloud now takes care of my storage and back up issues.

6. Microsoft has been going down hill since Bill Gates left and the future does not look good.

7. No virus issues.

[hedonist44]

I've had my Mac Pro 15" for over 4 years and never a glitch. To each his own, but I know what I'm staying with...

[DMC1]

I only switched over in April last year. At work I use a Windows laptop because I don't want to trash my Mac offshore. Windows is OK for what I use it for but I'm much happier to get back on the Mac when I get home. Far smoother IMO.

Edited August 2, 2012 by DMC1

[dominique355]

Switching to Mac is not for everyone. People who grew up on Windows will have trouble opening their minds to other operating systems. I switched to Mac 3 years ago for all of my business and it is the best move I ever made for some of the following reasons:

1. More flexible.

2. Hardware reliability.

3. Windows and Microsoft Office can be installed on Mac and two programs can be open at the same time. Therefore you do not loose any of your old Office Documents.

4. The last few issues of Windows has been a new set of problems and complications.

5. The future of storage and rental programs is going to be in the cloud. ICloud now takes care of my storage and back up issues.

6. Microsoft has been going down hill since Bill Gates left and the future does not look good.

7. No virus issues.

I use a MacBook Pro 15" Retina with Mountain Lion and a Toshiba Qosmio 17" with Win 7

Both are great machines but:

- Why does Apple not offer a BlueRay external disc when they go through the trouble of making a Retina display?

- Windows 7 is very stable (contrary to previous versions). Mountain Lion needs to be tested first.

- The Windows world is more flexible than the Mac world, because of a larger number of suppliers both of hardware and software

- You don't need to install Windows on your Mac to use the Office documents. There is a Mac version

- I don't trust iCloud, especially not in Thailand. Connectivity is still an issue here. And confidentiality still a big question mark.

- It is a myth thet there are no virus or other malware on OS X, simply not true.

- The quality of workmanship of the Mac is amazing. My Toshiba had to get repaired after 2 months (hard disk failure).

[Gary A]

Apple may indeed build nice equipment but their proprietary marketing schemes discourage me from buying anything Apple. Try to have an Apple product repaired when you live out in the boonies. For that matter try to have a laptop repaired here. Somchai may take a look at a laptop but he will refuse to touch an Apple. Take your desktop to his little shop and he will likely have it repaired while you wait. I had to take a top of the range Lenovo Thinkpad laptop 150 kilometers from home for service. Buy a desktop PC if at all possible. If your Apple laptop/product fails after the warranty ends, you better have a pocket full of money to pay for any repairs.

[watcharacters]

Switching to Mac is not for everyone. People who grew up on Windows will have trouble opening their minds to other operating systems. I switched to Mac 3 years ago for all of my business and it is the best move I ever made for some of the following reasons:

1. More flexible.

2. Hardware reliability.

3. Windows and Microsoft Office can be installed on Mac and two programs can be open at the same time. Therefore you do not loose any of your old Office Documents.

4. The last few issues of Windows has been a new set of problems and complications.

5. The future of storage and rental programs is going to be in the cloud. ICloud now takes care of my storage and back up issues.

6. Microsoft has been going down hill since Bill Gates left and the future does not look good.

7. No virus issues.

No fatal error blue screen. 555

[kuripot]

I changed over from Windows to Mac around 8 years ago and have not looked back. I have had several of their laptops (G3,G4,Intel) and iMacs( G5,Intel) over this time. Additionally I have built several hackintosh desktops over this period as well as converting some netbooks (Lenovo, Samasung, Acer) and cheap dells etc. I recently put Mountain Lion on an Asus 15" i5 cpu 8gb ram laptop which cost about 1/4 of a genuine macbook but is fully functional although not as robust as the genuine article. Nowadays I only use Windows on a bootcamp partition for phone unlocking software and sometimes for a keygen. For the few Windows only programs I use Crossover without the need to boot into Windows. I tried Windows 8 from within bootcamp and put it in the same category as Vista and ME which were disasters.

[ubonrthai]

I switched 3 years ago. Did the hackintosh thing for awhile but it always seemed to reduce performance. Top 4 things I like...

1. Visual organization of pics and video in iPhoto and video editing in Final Cut.

2. FaceTime is far more reliable than Skype and most people I keep in touch with overseas have an Apple product.

3. My MacBook Pro crashes once in awhile but nothing remotely close to the variety of PCs I owned in the past.

4. Exposé increased my productivity. I always have too much stuff open and this helps me move between them quicker.

[lemonjelly]

just got an MBP 13" 2.5 GHz...... quite happy so far, but they do get hot and you can't record from the audio card (i-diotic) unless you download some software and faff around... video card is integrated so cannot upgrade...... is it worth 39,000 baht..... less virus paranoia....for less you can buy a faster and more robust Dell or HP, I still use my IBM Thinkpad R50 sometimes if I'm doing a big typing task......best keyboard ever.... Apple, it's a bit of a hype no?

[tinfoilhat]

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".

i do it the other way around, i run win7 x64 on a macbook pro

[nikster]

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.

No, they didn't do that because they've decided that they can't solve the usability issues. Apple didn't come up with a good solution to combine a touch user interface with a mouse/keyboard interface. So they just made two different products.

We'll see how Microsoft fares with their attempt - Windows 8 is coming out end of the month. I think it'll bomb. It will be like Vista, except much worse.

PS: Still loving the retina MacBook Pro. It's true that websites that have not been upgraded look bad - namely pretty much any and all Thai websites. The pictures are just incredibly low res. But all the big and/or better websites have been upgraded. It's not an issue. I mean, I end up thinking "oh man, why didn't they upgrade their website"... I am not thinking "oh man, I wish I had a low res display, so I wouldn't notice how low res these images really are".

Edited October 13, 2012 by nikster

[tinfoilhat]

just got an MBP 13" 2.5 GHz...... quite happy so far, but they do get hot and you can't record from the audio card (i-diotic) unless you download some software and faff around... video card is integrated so cannot upgrade...... is it worth 39,000 baht..... less virus paranoia....for less you can buy a faster and more robust Dell or HP, I still use my IBM Thinkpad R50 sometimes if I'm doing a big typing task......best keyboard ever.... Apple, it's a bit of a hype no?

it is a bit of hype, the thing that i cant get past on Mac OS is that after years of using windows in a professional setting is how much more difficult it is to tinker and bend the OS to my liking, eventually i gave up and just started running windows on an exquisite piece of hardware.

[nikster]

it is a bit of hype, the thing that i cant get past on Mac OS is that after years of using windows in a professional setting is how much more difficult it is to tinker and bend the OS to my liking, eventually i gave up and just started running windows on an exquisite piece of hardware.

You have to give some specific examples, then I could tell you if you're right or if you just didn't Google for it enough.... hard to imagine there's anything you couldn't do on OS X, to be honest.

As a dev, I love having a proper command line / bash - what Windows has is a joke, and always has been. Not only is windows cmd shell extremely limited in what it can do, they also have not updated the terminal software itself since ... Windows 3.1 I guess.

I can tweak Windows to where it's tolerable, but what I end up really missing is all that excellent freeware / software I have on OS X. MenuMeters and iPulse first and foremost, there's no windows equivalent. MenuMeters shows network throughput in KB/s right in the menu bar - extremely useful. iPulse paints a beautiful little image of all system activity - CPU, network, HDD and a number of other things. I know what's going on at one glance. Nothing like it on Windows, I've searched wide and far.

Generally software - especially freeware and shareware - are of higher quality on the Mac.

[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.

No, they didn't do that because they've decided that they can't solve the usability issues. Apple didn't come up with a good solution to combine a touch user interface with a mouse/keyboard interface. So they just made two different products.

We'll see how Microsoft fares with their attempt - Windows 8 is coming out end of the month. I think it'll bomb. It will be like Vista, except much worse.

PS: Still loving the retina MacBook Pro. It's true that websites that have not been upgraded look bad - namely pretty much any and all Thai websites. The pictures are just incredibly low res. But all the big and/or better websites have been upgraded. It's not an issue. I mean, I end up thinking "oh man, why didn't they upgrade their website"... I am not thinking "oh man, I wish I had a low res display, so I wouldn't notice how low res these images really are".

Touch-screen Should eliminate the mouse, not work with it. Plug in a mouse, disable the touch-screen, not a BFD.

[KhunMoo]

Be sure you know what you are going into, before you switch

I switched to "All Apple" early this year:

Mac Book Air "13 inch 256GB SSD

Iphone 4S

IPAD 3

Apple Time Capsule 3TB

I had it for 6 Months or so - AND IM SELLING IT ALL NOW! AND GOING ALL IN ON WINDOWS 8!!

The hardware is beautiful, and solid builds...love the "feel" and as a former Linux user i thought i would love the software. And yes i can live with OS X, after tweaking it a bit (What the fuc_k is up with no cut/past?!?, Enter doesn't execute, hidden .settings files - why remove the ability to Skype call from the address book...oh..i could go on)

But the worst thing about Apple's little universe is that NOTHING works together. And that is exactly what it's supposed to do, and what you get the feeling of you can, when you watch Apple's commercials, what the fan-boys babble on about etc...

iOS is the biggest load of crap ever - it's of absolutely NO use, in work related situations - unless you only press some digits and press dial.

A quick rant over missing features(there are so many more, than listed here)

* No real file system, witch completely fuc_ks with you ability to control content (this is the absolute worst thing of the all)

* It makes dropbox useless on a iOS device, unless you just want to look at a .pdf or a photo.

* It makes it impossible to use files in different programs, switching in and out/sharing the file.

* It makes it impossible to have video files, that are placed where you want them - available to some programs, and not to others.

* It makes it impossible to have audio files, non categorized by STUPID algorithms in crappy iTunes, that sort files like a blind man, with no fingers.

* The list goes on....

* No flash is an serious issue, when you like live sports/news/interviews/reviews etc. that are not Youtube. It's getting better but there are still a lot of stuff you can't see - that is insane, if you consider the price-tag and that I'm over the age of consent (I'm old enough to decide, to use flash or not...thank you Mr. Jobs.)

* CRAPPY stock programs like the mail program in iOS that is 2-3 years behind everything else. The things added with iOS 6 is something you could do with a 10 year old Nokia, with a monochrome screen, it's pure insanity for the business user.

* No possibility to run programs not signed by Apple, this i "#€%#€"&€" annoying, and yes, there is a ton of other reasons that just "free" software. Android let's you do this with just pressing ONE box....and on Windows 8 Mobile/RT it's very easy to apply for developer status.

* No possibility to "control" your mobile devices from your laptop - e.g.. You can't send a SMS/Execute/move Files around via your iPhone, from your Laptop - this is beyond stupid for the business user, Nokia, Samsung and many others had this feature for YEARS!

* Until reasently no ability to see if a SMS is delivered or not (now after iOS 5.1 still only for for iMessage - again completely insane, every other device on the marked has this feature).

* Why on earth are there so many applications that will only work under Wifi on iOS?!? Even Apples own update or app downloads are capped at 20MB - THAT IS SO STUPID.

* The new Maps application is laugh (and NO, with expensive devices like this, i should not be forced to use Google via, a browser - and NO i won't "give em' time, they should have waited until their contract with Google ended or made a "ready to release" version them self, before they scrapped Google Maps.

* Why the #€"%#%€ Cant the iPad tether its 3G connection? Why this difference between the phone and the pad? It's a perfect example of Apple pissing on the consumer to please a ISP or a MNO.

* I'm "on the road" a lot, and carry a 18000 mAh external battery, that used to be able to power my whole mobile setup: Laptop, phone, tablet, mobile printer, with ONE cable to the wall - now with Apple, I don't have extra battery for my Laptop on the road....that SUCKS! And you are forced to carry so many different adaptors/chargers/connectors, that i even need to carry extra outlets, as many hotel rooms, docent have 3 outlets near the desk. And all this crap, because Apple is so greedy and would rather piss on the consumer and remove features, to suck and extra 10USD out of you. Instead of providing a nice feature for you....

* The Apple TC - Apple's so called "NAS" device, is a nice designed doorstopper or you can use it to elevate tables. IT IS NOT A NAS! You can't use SMB, Mobile devices can't see this crappy thing, and NOT EVEN APPLE'S OWN DEVICES....that is the biggest laugh. The <deleted> in white, want you to hook up a Mac mini or so to it, and then make it a shared volume, that way. It's simply pissing on the consumer(TC version 1 would be visible with a iTunes library).

I have so many other issues with Apple that it would take years to list. I went all in and got the whole line, to check out - and IMHO it's crap, overpriced and they are constantly pissing on the consumer, removing features, to try to force you to buy other stuff etc. - it's simply crazy that people keep defending these guys, but yes hats off for Apple's branding guys: Biggest scam in history of man kind.

Yes OS X, iOS etc. is simple - but if you have ANY other needs that just dial numbers, reply "Yes/no" to emails - The whole Apple line is CRAP.

My new setup will be like this:

* Windows 8 Pro Core i5 "laptop/pad". (Not on marked yet, will come soon)

* Mid range Windows 8 Phone, most likely from Samsung or Nokia.)

* Synology NAS with room for 2-4 disks.

This setup will give me a Laptop with the same power as the MacBook Air, it will give me a "10 to "13 inch Tablet(for free and no need to carrie two devices), that kicks iPad ass so much, that they are not even comparable and it will give me a LTE(When out of Thailand ) phone where I can actually mail attachments, edit them and so on. ALL my stuff is available AND controllable by me, so all stuff i have at home 1-16TB is available on all devices, at any time, any where in the world.

De difference between the two setups is so big, that it's crazy to compare them. The Apple solution is so limited and handicapped that it insane. But the best part, is that the solution that has 10x the features and 10x the capacity and speed.....is less than half the price of the Apple setup.

Yes, fanboys - go flame me. But please use exact examples, sizes, prices, etc. when you compare - maybe even with an example of a real life situation

Edited October 30, 2012 by KhunMoo