I bought my first PC in 1994 and never regretted it. I’ve had years of enjoyment, learning, information and even fun with PC’s…plus years of frustration, aggravation, disappointment and elevated blood pressure. Don’t you just hate it when you are about to finish a lengthy, detailed and quite tedious project and all of a sudden….the program crashes. Quite often much if not all of your hard work is gone and you get to start over. Me too!
So, I too switched to a Mac. What a difference! Like night and day. Gone are the constant and annoying updates, searching for the correct drivers and rebooting the system every day or so to get rid of bugs and glitches. When you plug a device into a Mac, voila, it just works.
After four months I have so far not had a single system crash or for that matter any Mac program crash. It is fast, efficient and pretty much trouble free. The transition is still ongoing because I’m still learning. Almost every day I learn yet another cool thing my new IMac can do. I’m a “learn as I go” kind of guy and didn’t spend hours pouring over instruction manuals to learn how to use it. The funny thing is I didn’t really need to. The actual transition took about an hour and I was using it with as much precision as any PC I ever owned. Someone told me that “Macs are so simple they stump PC users and make us think they are hard to use”. This is so true. Once you let go of the ingrained need to use the back door (as you’ve learned to do over the years with PCs) and think “simple” it all comes clear.
As for the lack of software, not a big problem. Many software companies write similar if not identical programs for Macs, and they work much better on Macs than they do on PCs. Most of the complaints from PC users about the lack of software is game related. The only thing I have to say to those users is, go buy a gaming system like and Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii. Games run a hundred times better on those systems than they do on your PC anyway. I have found only two work related programs that I actually have to use that won’t run on the Mac OS. For those I simply installed a neat little program called “Parallels”, which allowed me to install Windows XP on the system and run it right from the desktop. Not only do I have the ease and simplicity of the Mac, but I can still run the PC apps I am forced to use. Yes, I said forced! The PC programs I use are so backward and such lumbering dinosaurs they are only written for the PC platform. They are programs I truly despise, but for work I must use them. Unfortunately since “you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear” (as my grandfather used to say) you are stuck with all the frustrations that are so familiar to you when running any PC platform based application from a Mac, after all they are PC programs. The difference being, when the application crashes, the Mac OS simply allows you to shut down the application or at worst Parallels and try again. No rebooting the entire system. Sweet!
One of the great, added benefits of Parallels is the “transporter agent” that comes with it. Once installed on your old PC it “transports everything from your PC hard drive to your Mac. When you click on the resulting desktop icon it is just like using your old PC. It is still awkward, slow and glitchy but all your info is there and you can transfer it over to the Mac at your convenience.
Another added benefit is that, if you have an Iphone, it integrates seamlessly via Bluetooth with your Mac to upload or download most anything you need to transfer (music, videos, maps, pictures, etc).
All in all the only regret I have over switching from a PC to a Mac is, why didn’t I do this long ago?Macs are a little more expensive but definitely worth the added expense. Go ahead do yourself a favor, make the switch! You’ll be glad you did.
