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 Well, as with many things in life it turns out the facts that I knew about the Mac were either hopelessly outdated or simply myths.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.
Now I've never cared for the Windows OS - every PC I've owned has always had the shell replaced with one of my choosing, usually Litestep, including the Vista laptop I'm currently posting from, so I approached using Macs with a fairly open mind.
But the many little irritating things about the Mac OS have come together into one conclusion - I will never purchase one.
Have the object bar (which btw, I run on my Vista via Stardock's ObjectDock) set to auto-hide? Then you can't drag-and-drop to it.
Have the program window open, like Photoshop, and want to drag your image from your Finder window? Nope - you've got to drag it down to the icon on the Dock.
Want to replace the shell with a different one? Nope.
Want to change the look and feel of the GUI? Nope. Maybe add a background image to your Finder windows, but that's about it.
Use a custom cursor? Nope.
Instead of using Mac's I-Movie for video editing on the school's Mac towers I'm using Power Director on my laptop.
And for God's sake - someone please tell me how to go to 'home' and 'end' of a sentence in a browser window! Really - I have to use their Macs I want to know.
My mac came with the oxford American/english dictionary on it...didn’t yours? Not being sassy, just curious? Mine is intel based and came with Tiger...fyi.
That is also my experience based on a sample of roughly 50 people. It is around 98% because only one of the Mac users I know is a conservative. OK, so I hang around Silicon Valley. But it is a definite correlation. Apple management is a bunch of hardcore libs living in multi-multi-million dollar homes in the most exclusive enclaves of Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Atherton, etc, working hard to keep their exclusivity and keeping the riffraff well isolated from their exalted existences, other than letting them maintain their very impressive and large-scale landscaping.
I think that the cultural alignment with the leadership and its political perspectives is much more important than HW/SW performance, at least for the Mac aficionados that I know in the SF Bay Area / Silicon Valley. The Mac aficionados that I know in the working neighborhoods of my weekend existence in the Sacramento area spend much of our weekend get-togethers complaining about how things don't work and how their OS keeps crashing. When pressing my Silicon Valley buds I hear that yes, their Macs crash all the time, but they recover so nicely.
My samples are probably not representative of reality. For example, our video editing people use very high-end Mac platforms exclusively and what I see them do does blow me away. The home users have a lot of bad experiences, but they happily tolerate them because it's not evil Microsoft, but socially responsible Apple that's crashing their machines.
Again the Silicon Valley world is maybe not representative. What do you guys in the more normal parts of the country find?
Over here in Oklahoma 100% of the people I know using Macs are conservative. Heck, I’m probably the most liberal of the bunch, and here I am posting on the premier conservative Web site on the internet.
Moving forward the user base of Macs will move closer to the 50/50 split of the population. For so long Macs were the domain of liberals because they were best at jobs liberals were interested in. That is changing and so will the user base.
About 3 months after my dad got a Powerbook, Delta dropped it and put a big dent in the side of it. Now three years later it is still trucking with no problems. How many PC laptops can do that? Most of them are in fact plastic and would have shattered. The aluminum Mac book just took it and kept on going like it was normal business.
My Dock is auto-hide... and I drag and drop to and from it all the time. Perhaps you don't really know how to use a Mac?
Have the program window open, like Photoshop, and want to drag your image from your Finder window? Nope - you've got to drag it down to the icon on the Dock.
Photoshop, yes, but that was a choice that Adobe made—to ignore Apple's user interface standards—in any Apple application dragging from the Finder to the application window, or between application windows, or from an application window to a Finder window works fine. Universal dragging and dropping is something that the Mac does very well.
You can also drag and drop from any application into Photoshop with no problem.
Want to replace the shell with a different one? Nope.
There are a number of Finder replacements including Quicksilver.
Want to change the look and feel of the GUI? Nope. Maybe add a background image to your Finder windows, but that's about it.
Yes, you can. I can understand that the University might not allow you to do that to their computers, though.
Use a custom cursor? Nope.
But why would you want to do those things? Every Windows machine I've seen with Themes and fancy cursors is almost impossible to use accurately... finding the active point on a custom pointer that's a swinging gorilla can be very difficult. In my opinion, they all get in the way of productivity. And for God's sake - someone please tell me how to go to 'home' and 'end' of a sentence in a browser window! Really - I have to use their Macs I want to know.
You can use Command Left and Right arrow to move to the beginning and ending of a line.
Or unless you want to use Second Life, watch high-res video, rip your CD collection to MP3, browse Google Earth, or edit photos or video. That's a few tens of millions of users right there.
And, heaven forfend, some folks like to get a machine that will have the capability to run whatever some clever dude comes up with next year or the year after.
The New Oxford American Dictionary is not the same thing as the Oxford English Dictionary. The former is, don't get me wrong, a fine dictionary for 99% of what most people use a dictionary for. The latter is uncontested as the authoritative dictionary of the English language, and for folks who are into words it's fun to browse for the etymologies alone.
A printed set of the OED (20 volumes, 22,000 pages) costs about a grand. The CD-ROM costs $295, and subscribing to the online version costs $295 a year. It's not for everyone.
The home users have a lot of bad experiences, but they happily tolerate them because it's not evil Microsoft, but socially responsible Apple that's crashing their machines.
What a load of stinking pile of made up FUD. I have been using OSX Macs and administering several networks of OSX Macs for years. I have had maybe FIVE crashes in seven years among about 40 OS X Macs. Three of those were on my home machine when I was using OSX.1 SEVEN YEARS AGO. One of the professional medical offices I maintain has had 8 OS X Macs running 24/7/365 and has not had a single system crash in four years under very heavy use. The only time the computers are restarted is when I've installed OS updates or there has been a power failure that exceeds the battery back-up time. I will be upgrading all of them in the following week to OSX.5 Leopard.
I have attended the Sacramento Macintosh User Group meetings in the past and Macs crashing is NEVER the topic of conversation.
So, quite frankly, SFConservative, I don't believe you. What you relate is totally contrary to my experience and the experiences of many of my Mac using friends, most of whom are moderate to extreme conservatives. NONE of them complain about their Mac's "crashing." Not one.
OH, wait! Sorry. I had one client who's original 9 year old 400MHz PowerMac G4 (PCI) crashed a couple of weeks ago. This Mac had been originally been sold running MacOS 8.6 and was running OS X.4.11 Tiger when the hard drive failed. I put a new drive in and installed Leopard and it is running like a champ.
As for the political orientation of Mac users, the New York Times did a survey of Mac users among their readership about two years ago. They found that slightly more than 40% of the respondents self-identified themselves as conservative—IIRC, about 45% self identified as liberal or progressive—and that was among the readership of the New York Times, hardly a conservative bastion.
i will point out that conservative Mac users include Rush Limbaugh, President Bush, Karl Rove, Michelle Malkin, Mel Gibson, Tom Clancy, Malcolm Forbes Jr., G. Gordon Liddy, Dick Cheney...
By “refurbished” you simply mean “used,” not factory refurbished.
Exactly.
The author's assertion that low cost PCs are often subsidized by bundled application software that is included with a new machine is a weak argument at best.
I am writing this on a Core-Duo PC running XP Pro SP3 that I paid $800 for and it came with zero bundled software.
I have had zero problems with it and would never dream of paying over $2000 for a Mac that isn't going to perform any better or do any more for me than this machine does.
"It's all about the Benjamins" has to be sitting right at the top of any list of reasons why people eschew Macs.
Damn right!
I got tired of the crap coming out of Detroit so I'm building my own car.........which I should be able to drive in a couple of years...........
So.....who's being the 'a**hole' on this thread?
Incorrect. Factory refurbished by Apple purchased from Apple with full Apple warranty.
Apple gets the external USB and Fireware at the same time anyone else does. But you're right on things like SATA, although those don't come along too often. But Apple was an early adopter of Bluetooth and built-in Wi-Fi (IIRC the first ever to build an antenna into the case).
Just having fun...nothing personal. Enjoy your Mac.
I knew I would get some people with that post! Nothing personal-just having fun. Enjoy your Mac.
I have heard it is now really possible for Macs and PC’s to share a network. I really do miss the Amiga. While I do support W’s statement this week while in Israel, still I would sit down and talk with many Macs users. I have done a survey of Mac user I know, and there is a direct correlation between how fervent believer in Macs and being a wacko left wing liberal among the people I know Most of the conservatives that use macs I know are K-12 educations. But the most ardent Macs supported I know also believes that pot is THE solution to both the worlds clothing and fuel problems. Medical use is just the start. I wonder what kind of computers they use at Bob Jones or Oral Roberts University. I knew a salesmen that supplied a Scientology campus with only high end macs.
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