might switch to mac, have some concerns.

ease of use- #1 if you ask me. Very intuitive for most people that I have talked to- a few have said counterintuitive to them, but I think they are just so used to Windows that they are set in their ways. Everything just makes sense as far as navigation.

Compatibility. For best compatibility just buy Word or Office. You can do it through other means depending on how much you exchange info with PC users, but if you use MS products for the Mac there is NO problem exchanging data, etc. Word, Excel, Powerpoint all transfer fine.

Gaming is an issue. Tell us what types of games you like, etc. I would rec. getting a console game and a Mac if you are very heavy into games. If you just dabble with a few games them maybe a Mac, but that is definately the weak link for Macs currently.

Patmian212 said:

Come on, convince me.

Daniel.

Click to expand...

Macs are the best thing ever! You will not regret it! (Well, what do you expect us to say?!)
Not many people switch back - that should tell you everything!
Only use a PC if you care a lot about games.
I have a xbox and Mac combo, works great for me.
Microsoft Office has a newer version on the Mac, and IMO it's better.

Of course it will take a while to re-learn all the things you're used to on PC, but buying a book like "OS X: The Missing Manual" (When it comes out for 10.4 "Tiger") will go a long way to smoothing the transition.
Once you've learnt how to do it all (I give you 2-6 months depending on usage) you'll begin to realize how much better things can be on a Mac.

Go on, just do it, you know you want to!

Patmian212 said:

sounds pretty good, and the types games which im into are: age of mythology, dawn of war, world of warcraft, battlefield 1942, etc.

Click to expand...

WoW plays fine on my dual-2.0 GHz Rev A PowerMac with a lowly 9600 GPU. I haven't played the others.

WoW, BF1942 and AoM are available for the Mac; DoW isn't.

And don't forget you have to re-buy all the games, since they're not intercompatible. There are rare cases where companies actually have both the PC and Mac versions on the disc (Blizzard is one example - you won't have to re-buy WoW).

Gaming is indeed Macs' weak point. I'm a gamer.

Yet I'm selling my PC soon. Consoles are getting better and better, and outside certain genres, they just do it better and are more cost-efficient than a $1,000 gaming PC.

Plus games almost always come late to Macs - Doom 3 has been out for the PC almost a year already, and it only just came out for the Mac last month.

So if you're going Mac, plan to scale back your PC gaming considerably. PC gaming is a dying breed anyway; the consoles are taking over.

Keep your PC and get a Mac mini for now...

Once you find that the Mac is easy for you, buy a great Mac.

I am on a PC because my dad won't buy me a Mac yet (although I think I am getting one soon as he found a virus that was annoying for him to get rid of on his PC) but I learned how to use a Mac by visiting the Westchester mall once a week and going to the Apple store...

It is hard for PC users to learn, however. My dad went in once with me and thought the iMac was kind of fast so he wanted to see the specs and didn't know how - Windows: Right Click My Computer, Mac: Click Apple, Click About This Mac

I have to warn you about one thing:
When it comes to the Office Suite compatibility, it is usually okay. However, there have been MANY occasions in which I prepare a presentation on Mac and then have to give the talk on PC where pictures may be missing or something will be funky. The same happens if I prepare a presentation on PC and present on Mac. This does not happen all the time - I think it has something to do with Quicktime (I don't know why I say this, it just popped into my head. Maybe I read about it somewhere). In any case, Office suite compatibility is not 100% but darn close to it.

Be careful what other applications you may want to use. If you're looking at very general software, it should be fine. In fact, most big time commercial software can be available for PC and Mac. There are some times when you may want to use a simple piece of freeware of shareware that may not be available on the Mac though. These are very rare, but just something else to keep in mind.

I can speak for ease of use, 'cause i switched in 2003 and not only was it not a problem but it was actually fun discovering all the mac shortcuts... all I can say is that it felt like i had arrived at the computing 'promised land': form and function at its best.

hhlee said:

I have to warn you about one thing:
When it comes to the Office Suite compatibility, it is usually okay. However, there have been MANY occasions in which I prepare a presentation on Mac and then have to give the talk on PC where pictures may be missing or something will be funky. The same happens if I prepare a presentation on PC and present on Mac. This does not happen all the time - I think it has something to do with Quicktime (I don't know why I say this, it just popped into my head. Maybe I read about it somewhere). In any case, Office suite compatibility is not 100% but darn close to it.

Click to expand...

PowerPoint and a warning you need a QuickTime decompressor to view the image?

The images are being imported to PowerPoint as TIFFs. You need to import them as JPEGs. TIFFs are the same format but big or little endian format. Aka, Mac or x86 format. So you need to convert all the pictures to JPEGs, (Automater anyone?) and then import then into PowerPoint. And hey, whaddya know, it works!

Mechcozmo said:

PowerPoint and a warning you need a QuickTime decompressor to view the image?

The images are being imported to PowerPoint as TIFFs. You need to import them as JPEGs. TIFFs are the same format but big or little endian format. Aka, Mac or x86 format. So you need to convert all the pictures to JPEGs, (Automater anyone?) and then import then into PowerPoint. And hey, whaddya know, it works!

Click to expand...

Wow, never knew TIFFs are platform-dependent. Are you sure? Because I've never ran into this issue swapping TIFFs with PC users...

I've created TIFF's on a PC, think that might be a white lie.

The point is that you do need to be aware of this minor incompatability (whether TIFFs or some other format, it doesn't matter). Use JPEGs, and you should be ok. But check which ones work before you get caught out. Has happened to me a couple of times.

The other Win Office : OSX Office incompatability that irritates me is in fonts - sometimes the typeface and sizes change when moving Powerpoint files from PC to Mac or vice versa.

Generally, however, I find very few problems - and I move files to & from Windows machines almost every day.

I bought my first Mac last summer. I like it. I also still use my PC because, well, I do have some apps that don't have Mac equivalents or that I'm not 100% satisifed with the Mac equivalent.

Ease of use depends on how long you've been a Windows user and how intimately familiar you are with Windows. There is a "Mac way" of doing things and I found it's very different from the "Windows way" (which coincidentally was the "OS/2 way" before Windows became a serious contender in the mid 90s). However once you know the Mac way, it's pretty simple. Just like when I moved from DOS to Windows, I had to unlearn the DOS way and learn the Windows way.

Moving to Mac is not quite as big a step, since many concepts (push buttons, check boxes, overlapping windows, multitasking) are the same in Windows and in MacOS X. A casual Windows user may take a few days to get used to the Mac way. A die-hard Windows user (or especially a developer) may take weeks to get used to it.

File and program compatibility is probably best between Windows and MacOS, since they both have many of the same commercial developers working on them (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe) and many open-source projects are cross-platform by nature (Mozilla and Firefox, Apache, OpenOffice.org). I think moving to Mac was much easier than moving to Linux.

Raven VII said:

Wow, never knew TIFFs are platform-dependent. Are you sure? Because I've never ran into this issue swapping TIFFs with PC users...

Click to expand...

Yup they are. Save one from Graphic Converter or Photoshop and see what option it gives you. HINT: PC-Compatible or Macintosh byte-ordering.

The G4 and G3 chips I think can do both big and little endian but are native big-endian, however the G5s dropped little endian support. PCs are little endian only.

I may have gotten that backwards, but you get the idea. TIFFs are great but are kinda a pain in the butt sometimes. PNGs are the new way to go!

Patmian212 said:

sounds pretty good, and the types games which im into are: age of mythology, dawn of war, world of warcraft, battlefield 1942, etc.

Click to expand...

Check out http://insidemacgames.com/ for a detailed run down of the games available.

Little side note

While it's true that Winderz has more freeware/shareware available in general, the Mac world is definitely catching up. This is due to OS X being based on UNIX. Those Linux renegades out there are now making software for the Mac at pretty much the same time as Linux, while their Winderz variants often fall far behind (assuming they're bothering to make one in the first place... why would a Linux person want to work on Windows software?). Places like sourceforge.net are full of cool stuff for OS X. Also, OS X has a lot of libraries that Apple hasn't written GUIs for. But there's oodles of functionality in there, and the open source world is busily making it available.
While I admit to being a bit prejudiced, I think that a lot of the 'ware for OS X is superior to most of what's being made for Winderz. With Winderz you almost never know what kind of spyware people are passing around in their freeware. Since Mac's stuff is largely open source, that isn't much of an issue.

kiwi-in-uk said:

The point is that you do need to be aware of this minor incompatability (whether TIFFs or some other format, it doesn't matter). Use JPEGs, and you should be ok. But check which ones work before you get caught out. Has happened to me a couple of times.

The other Win Office : OSX Office incompatability that irritates me is in fonts - sometimes the typeface and sizes change when moving Powerpoint files from PC to Mac or vice versa.

Generally, however, I find very few problems - and I move files to & from Windows machines almost every day.

Click to expand...

all this powerpoint talk is pretty much user error. if your making a presentation to eventually run on a PC but you dont know anything about the PC system then you should use basic system fonts that the mac and pc both use. should we really expect a pc to be able to use mac fonts? in short you need to know the nature of the system the job is being output on...in this case a PC.

also, i thought pc's can only read rgb tiffs? not cmyk. i dont know if thats true though. i avoid powerpoint. the only microsoft application that i like is entourage.

Patmian212 said:

Hey, i am patmian212's friend. i have recently discovered mac but i use PCs normally. Patmian212 has been trying to convince me but i have a few concerns.

1.- ease of use.- is it easy to ge the hang of?
2.- Compatibilty with PCs eg: programs (word editors, etc)
3.- Light gaming- number of games i can play.

Come on, convince me.

Daniel.

Click to expand...

1) Heck yeah
2) Yup, you can get the entire Microsoft Office if you wish. Or if you have a faster Mac, download the free OpenOffice. Or get iWork which can do Word documents, PowerPoint documents, and Keynote (which is far superior to PowerPoint- think PowerPoint with 3d effects).
3) http://www.apple.com/games/features/ Some (not all by far) of the featured Mac games.


There's also security. Viruses for Windows: 90,000. Viruses for Mac OS X: 0.
And stability.
And its just plain awesome.

There's also superior design. Ever experienced Windows rot? You know what I mean...you've run Windows for a year, installed lots of programs, and the more programs you install, the slower it goes. Slower, and slower, and slower, until you must reformat. Mac OS X does not suffer from this at all. It's nonexistant. Install as many applications as you want.

The reason this happens is that every Windows app you install adds some stuff to the registry, some stuff to the Windows folder, and some stuff everywhere. On a Mac, applications are self contained. Another good thing about this is that it means most applications don't even require installers. Installation of Jedi Knight 2, for example, was me dragging and dropping a folder from the CD to my hard drive. It just copied it and I could double click to run.

Networking is a breeze as well. It can access Mac, Windows, and Linux shares.

Macs rock

Mechcozmo said:

Yup they are. Save one from Graphic Converter or Photoshop and see what option it gives you. HINT: PC-Compatible or Macintosh byte-ordering.

The G4 and G3 chips I think can do both big and little endian but are native big-endian, however the G5s dropped little endian support. PCs are little endian only.

I may have gotten that backwards, but you get the idea. TIFFs are great but are kinda a pain in the butt sometimes. PNGs are the new way to go!

Click to expand...

Except that Photoshop on BOTH platforms has support for both platforms. If Photoshop for Mac can read TIFF-Windows and TIFF-Mac, then it works fine

There's indeed a problem with Powerpoint for windows blocking access to certain media format. The TIFF is indeed block. You can convert your image to JPEG or unlock this feature. Yeap you read well, Microsoft have cripple there own version of office so people are using there media format more often.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q235950

From Microsoft directly, yes I have try it and it work to modify the registry or the workaround, so, it's a cripple thing, not an incapacity. I found that doing a presentation with some Flash anime inside, I try many format before founding the problem is Microsoft again.

For the rest, everything is really smooth, I have 2 switcher around me recently, the first 3 week may look hard cause you will be searching equivalence of software (ask people around, http://www.versiontracker.com or http://www.macupdate.com) you should found quickly. After that both have say it's heaven.

The only big missing appz IMO is AutoCAD and Catia. Hope they will make there way to Mac. Mac gaming is not great like the other have say, but if you're an occasional gamer there will be no problem, but if you like playing last game right away, don't use your Mac as a gaming machine.

Hope it's help.

Have patience

My few cents ... it will take some time to get used to Mac ... I know it took me a while but now I'm hooked. I find OS X to be more intuitive and easier to use than it's Windows counterparts. It may take time to get used to a 1 button mouse, I know that it took me a while as I was so used to wanting to right click on icons and folders. I now use keyboard shortcuts instead of right clicking.

You'll be able to run Windows based programs on a Mac with Virtual PC (from Microsft).

I really don't play games on my system so I can't comment.

Overall, I think you'll be a happier computer user once you Switch To A Mac

hhlee said:

I have to warn you about one thing:
When it comes to the Office Suite compatibility, it is usually okay. However, there have been MANY occasions in which I prepare a presentation on Mac and then have to give the talk on PC where pictures may be missing or something will be funky. The same happens if I prepare a presentation on PC and present on Mac. This does not happen all the time - I think it has something to do with Quicktime (I don't know why I say this, it just popped into my head. Maybe I read about it somewhere). In any case, Office suite compatibility is not 100% but darn close to it.

Be careful what other applications you may want to use. If you're looking at very general software, it should be fine. In fact, most big time commercial software can be available for PC and Mac. There are some times when you may want to use a simple piece of freeware of shareware that may not be available on the Mac though. These are very rare, but just something else to keep in mind.

Click to expand...

Are you using Office vX or 2004? I had similar problems with X but 2004 is pretty much perfect for me.