Posted on 05/16/2008 12:31:37 PM PDT by Swordmaker
There are lots of reasons that people don't want to switch from Windows to Macintosh. I assume the most common reason is simply because Windows works for the people that are using it. The old adage "If it ain't broke don't fix it" tends to apply here. These people are not upgrading to Vista either, they're staying with Windows XP or even Windows 98 and are just fine.
There are however an increasing number of people that are moving to Macs now - many of them people like me that hated Macs at one time. I believe there are lots of reasons for this, not the least of which is that people that are running Windows XP are faced with an upgrade to Vista as their next logical step and feel that maybe it's okay to consider a Mac since they have to go through a full operating system refresh anyway.
One of the reasons I was not interested in Macs for a very long time was that I clung to many facts about the Mac that I felt eliminated it from contention. Well, as with many things in life it turns out the facts that I knew about the Mac were either hopelessly outdated or simply myths. What I wanted to do was tell you the ones that I was aware of and often cited when I dismissed Macs in the past.
Mac's only use a single mouse button
I'm not a Mac historian, my history with the Mac being very recent but I've read that Mac multi-button mouse support has been around for some time. You may look at the MacBook keyboards and only see a single mouse button or a Mighty Mouse and think that it's not supported. The reality is the MacBook track pad has an ingenious way of supporting right mouse clicks that I find better than having the extra little stub that is a right mouse button.
You simply press two fingers to the surface and click the button and it emulates a right mouse click. While the Mighty Mouse (which I personally detest) only appears to have a single mouse button it does indeed support right clicking. I just plugged in my Logitech mice and happily right click whenever I need to.
There are not that many applications for Macs
Windows does indeed have far more applications written for it than are available for Mac. What you have to do is look at the quality of those applications though. Many of the hundreds of thousands that are cited for Windows were written back in the 90s and few have been updated. Sure, most still work but that doesn't mean they are still relevant. I have found no lack of software for my Macs - virtually anything I have needed is available in native Mac format.
Frankly, as a Mac n00bie I was shocked by the volume of quality Mac software available, especially on the consumer front. The number of Mac titles for business software, especially in the vertical markets for small businesses, is much smaller though.
Macs are closed machines that cannot be expanded
I have personally swapped out the memory in my MacBook inside of about 5 minutes. I upgraded my MacBook's hard drive in another 5 minutes. That's about all you can physically do with any laptop, whether it's a PC or a Mac. My Mac Pro upgrades were even easier. That machine is designed to make expanding common hardware about as easy as it gets. It took me less than a minute to install a 1TB hard drive - so little time I grabbed my video camera and filmed how easy it was:
Sure, I can't overclock my processor and the number of graphics card drivers that are supported by OS X is significantly smaller than Windows but to say I can't put non-Apple replacement parts into my Mac is just not the case. The Mac Mini and iMacs are limited in their upgrade options, but the same holds true of the Windows machines from Dell and HP that have the CPU and display all packaged together.
Macs don't work well with Windows machines on a network
I've got a GB switch at home and a variety of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Ubuntu and now Mac machines on it. Sharing files between the machines is very simple. My Macs can see my Windows shares and my Windows machines can see my Mac shared folders. I shared my printer attached to a Windows machine with my Mac and it was able to use it just fine.
Macs are more expensive
This is the one that I struggle with a bit. Yes, the Macs are slightly more expensive than PCs in general, but you have to look at what you are or more importantly not getting when you buy a Mac. Low cost PCs are often subsidized by bundled application software that is included with a new machine. When I recently bought a little HP that would eventually serve as my Ubuntu workstation it came so loaded with crap and Windows Vista that it barely even ran out of the box. The average consumer that isn't a techie would be hard pressed to clear up all of the stuff that bogs down the average new PC.
For techies it's a different story. You can go to places like Newegg and build a high performance system that has exactly what you want on it - nothing more, nothing less - and adjust expectations on price accordingly. But doing that means you are your own technical support clearing house. When the motherboard in my newly built gaming rig wouldn't post I had to call the manufacturer and work through a series of steps before we found that the board was shorting out. I needed to RMA it myself and undergo the same process when the replacement arrived days later. It took me the better part of two working days to build up that machine.
That said, I did that because I enjoyed doing it, however that time comes at a cost. Is your time worth anything to you? If it is and you don't find joy in doing this kind of technical troubleshooting then getting a fully tested and serviced machine that works out of the box is incredibly valuable. You get what you pay for in this case.
Macs can't run my Windows software
Well, that of course is not the case. I can take a legal copy of Windows XP or Vista and without spending any money use Bootcamp (which comes with OS X) and boot into Windows if I have to. It's standard PC hardware so it runs great. Better yet, grab a copy of VMware Fusion and run the Windows applications side by side with your Mac apps.
I haven't tried playing any high-end games on my Macs yet. This blog has burned up my remaining free time so they are out for now, though that's the most common complaint I've heard that I can't refute. Perhaps someone can jump in here and clarify that one. Can you play high end games like Crysis on Mac hardware and get decent performance?
Macs are mouse centered machines. You constantly have to grab the mouse.
Macs not only have excellent keyboard support, the use of shortcuts is profound. About the only thing I've found that doesn't work as well as Windows is the use of mnemonics in dialog windows that make it easy to jump to a field in a large form with lots of items in it. When a dialog pops up inside of a Mac I find that I generally grab the mouse.
On the other hand shortcuts on the Mac are consistent between applications and liberally sprinkled throughout. If you have ever seen someone that really knows the Mac well use a keyboard to do some work it's an exercise in humility. It's like productivity++.
So there you have it, the myths that I clung to that kept me from seriously considering a Mac for so long. I'm sure there are other reasons that people think switching from Windows to Mac is a bad idea - I've seen enough flame wars on the topic to know that it's a religious issue for many.
That's one of the little things that bugs the *&^% out of me on Windows. On a Mac, if I want to copy a URL from the address bar to paste into an e-mail or AIM, it's a piece of cake -- shift-up-arrow goes to the beginning, shift-down-arrow selects the line, and command-C copies. Windows one-line text fields also don't seem to have a consistent double- and triple-click behavior.
In fairness, there might be an equally simple way to do that in Windows, but it's not as automatic to me.
That's one of the little things that bugs the *&^% out of me on Windows. On a Mac, if I want to copy a URL from the address bar to paste into an e-mail or AIM, it's a piece of cake -- shift-up-arrow goes to the beginning, shift-down-arrow selects the line, and command-C copies. Windows one-line text fields also don't seem to have a consistent double- and triple-click behavior.
In fairness, there might be an equally simple way to do that in Windows, but it's not as automatic to me.
That's not really true. Last year's $1600 pc used quality capacitors, power supplies and other components. This year's $400 pc has the same CPU, but the motherboard was made by some random factory in China, with electrical components from a factory that stole the electrolyte formula in the capacitors so they leak in 9 months and a power supply that can't regulate the voltage properly.
Many, if not most, Windows crashes are related to hardware problems
Oh, and Control-Home or Control-End doesn’t work in all of *Microsoft’s* own applications. In Publisher, for example, Control-End moves you to the end of the text field (and if you’re not in a text field it either doesn’t work or PUTS you in a text field), not to the end of the document. In Access, it doesn’t move the page at all, it *immediately* takes you to the last field in the last record in the file. In PowerPoint, it works like Publisher, and it doesn’t work at ALL in Visio.
In windows, the first click selects the entire address. Otherwise, click on the address, then hit ctrl-a, ctrl-c to select all and copy.
Except... it doesn’t always work that way. Depends on what version of IE you happen to be running at the time, etc., etc.
Luigi.
I know I'm being nasty but so is that drunken slob.
:-)
It consistent in IE7 and Firefox on XP.
Ctrl-a, Ctrl-c also works in Linux and Apple-a, Apple-c works on a Mac.
I still haven’t transferred my LDS Personal Ancestry Files over to my mac because I’m afraid I’ll screw things up making the mac run windows files. Do I use Crossover? Parallel?
What’s the best software for the PAF?
(sigh)
Well yes, I don’t care for either OS, I just care less for Macs than for my modified Windows.
The thing is I've been a Windows user since the 286 version and I still am. When it came time to replace my main home system I decided on a Mac instead of Windows again, and I got what I believe was a good value.
What you perceive as superiority is a bunch of people who have found something much, much better and want to help others by letting them know. The only problem is most responses are full of the above myths ("ungodly amount of dough") instead of being informed.
I’ve always had at least two PCs since 1994. I’ve never spent more than $600 on one
That's hard to believe unless you were buying old, used stuff. A fairly loaded 486 cost well over $2,000 in 1994 (which was after the Pentiums came out as the high-end machines). I didn't hear about sub-$1,000 machines until the late 90s.
It comes with a short version. The dictionary I’m talking about is the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. It comes in 20 printed volumes or 1 CD-ROM. It Contains more of a history of the English language. They do not have a version that runs on a Mac. Seems crazy to me but c’est la vive.
Just copy the files, then use this:
http://www.lanopalera.net/Genealogy/AboutPAWriter.html
I have written a freeware genealogy program, Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II), for the Macintosh, one version for MacOS 9.x and one for MacOS X. It combines most of the features of the LDS Personal Ancestral File program (PAF) for the Macintosh (for which all development stopped a few years ago after release 2.3.1), with additional features that generate web pages (in HTML), word processing files (in RTF for, e.g., AppleWorks) and desktop publishing files (in MML for FrameMaker). The generated report files include genealogical dictionaries, registers, ahnentafels and lineages—such as appear on this site—as well as some interesting text files and pedigree charts.
The Mac OS X dock hiding option has been available since the first beta versions were released nearly eight years ago.
But the fact is, with their machines, if the dock is hidden and something is dragged to it, it doesn't come up and allow itself to be dropped on.
This means the dock has to be made really small to allow as much real estate as possible.
Thanks for jogging my memory. That Mac is probably running in “Parental Control” mode (in System Preferences/Accounts), which has a Finder checkbox option for “Modify the Dock”. That seems like a reasonable restriction for a public-access computer.
Very true. I knew the author wasn't speaking in absolutes and neither was I.
However, there are quite a lot of people such as myself who think nothing of planning and building their own systems to save money and get quality components.
And there are those who will purposely seek out machines that are available with no bundling in order to start with a fresh install. And those numbers have grown quite a lot in recent years. Yet there are still large numbers of 'unsophisticated' users who buy the machines with bundled crapware, as you say, because they don't know any better.
Good thing for me because I get decent money from a lot of folks to expunge this crapware and secure their machines with lean, efficient applications to guard against further exposure.
Ah, thanks - I'll look for that next time and see.
/bingo
(multiple)
The low end Mac is $599. It compares favorably with the low end PCs that are in its price range. And it doesn’t come with the bloatware that haunts cheap Windows machines.
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