How much time to get use to mac?

mxelre said:

Ok so I'm starting university fall 2008 and Im buying a 15" MBP(with the free ipod touch student discount) Considering I've never worked with apple computers I was wondering how much time should I allow myself to get use to it? I was planning on buying it at the end of august but now I'm not sure I wanna do that. Knowing myself if I buy it at the end of august I'm just gonna focus on the laptop for like 2 weeks and just forget about school!

Anyways, from past experiences what would you guys do?

Thanks

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buy it now, if your switching from winodws, its going to take some getting used to. I hated mine when I first got it, but now I lOVE it ! !

it took me like 2 days, and i was a windows user all my life.

i did cheat a little by reading alot online about osx, there are so many great websites with tutorials and walkthroughs. even apple.com.... so check these out and beleive me by the time you open the box you'll be an expert already lol.

takes 1 min to get used to. buy now.

From my experience it was about a month before it felt natural to use macs but to get used to it was really about 2 days. I just had to get in the mindset of "if I want to do that where would it be rather than where did they hide it"

Not much work gets down in the first couple of weeks at uni anyway.

I don't think it took me even a week to get used to mine, and I was a winblows user for the life of it.

It took me about a week. Mostly because of the keyboard shortcut. Instead of using CTRL, I had to use the apple key.... But now, I just find more natural to use apple + c (my thumb + c) rather than ctrl + c ( pinky + c)...

Took me a week to fall in love, and another couple weeks to start getting used to all the shortcuts and so forth. I'm still not as much of a power user as I was on a PC and have no clue as to any of the terminal commands or how the user's directory is organized, but that's not stuff you need on a daily basis. The learning curve for Mac is much better than that for Windows.

Hidden gems just keep on coming but 20-30 mins should have you up to speed.

Only major gotcha's I know of are 'The finder' icon (smiling mac face) on the dock is what gets you to your disk/files, you have to QUIT an app from the menu bar not the red cross traffic light in the active window, and that to eject a disc you drag it to the bin. The rest is utterly intuitive. You'll be flying along fine after an evening with it...

Plus don't forget to go straight to the keyboard & mouse preferences under System settings (on the dock) and turn on touchpad right click (lightly rest two fingers on the touchpad and click the button - right click!)

mxelre said:

I've never worked with apple computers I was wondering how much time should I allow myself to get use to it?

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I bought a 24" iMac. My nine year old daugher was able to use Mac OS X right away without anyone having to tell her what to do. Same with my wife. Windows users typicaly think "It took me years to figure this out, I can't afford to go through that long process agian." But that's only because of Window's poor design

That said, there are levels of expertise. Mac OS X is Unix and it comes with a full, profesional level development system. You can spend years, full time learning this and never know it all. It has great "depth".

But as a normal user who just needs to use a word procesor and web browser there is not much of a learning curve.

Two days to get familiar with Finder and the basic keyboard shortcuts, as previously mentioned, is a good estimate. Manipulating directory trees, as users tend to do in Windows, is not all that necessary in OS X-- most OS X-based applications track the files for you.

As far as getting used to the applications, here's my testimony:

My four-year-old daughter saw me playing around with Photo Booth one day. In less than three minutes, and with virtually no instruction from me, she was changing effects and backgrounds and taking snapshots all by herself. (Of course, whenever she's in the vicinity of my iMac nowadays, she always asks to "do Funny Faces", as she calls the app.)

mxelre said:

Ok so I'm starting university fall 2008 and Im buying a 15" MBP(with the free ipod touch student discount) Considering I've never worked with apple computers I was wondering how much time should I allow myself to get use to it? I was planning on buying it at the end of august but now I'm not sure I wanna do that. Knowing myself if I buy it at the end of august I'm just gonna focus on the laptop for like 2 weeks and just forget about school!

Anyways, from past experiences what would you guys do?

Thanks

Click to expand...

My first mac was a 15" Powerbook I got in college. I found it very simple to use and actually freed up my time since I didn't need to defrag, run antivirus, and be slowed down by spyware. I did all my normal tasks first and then expanded to things I wanted to do, but don't do all the time. It took me a few days.

My girlfriend used it briefly whenever she came to visit and at first didn't like it because it she was used to Windows. After a couple of weeks, she wanted her own.

By the way, you can check out some tutorials at http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/

Time

If i was you i would buy now and get use to using office for it. That was the trickiest thing for me was to get use to how everything was laid out.

5 ways to eject
- Keyboard has an eject key for optical media (on laptops you hold down the eject for a second)
- In finder, click the eject (looks like upside down triangle) which is next to the disk icon
- Select disk and use keyboard shortcut Command-E
- Select disk, open menu, and select eject
- Drag to recycle bin, with is already mentioned.
Use which ever suits you. I use keyboard shortcut.

There are usually multiple way to do things. Keyboard short cuts are listed in the menus and quite useful for something you do a lot. (note unlike windows where people do not use menus because the placement is awful, thus needing the little tool bars, Macs menu is on the edge of the screen which makes them easier to access).

OSX is optimized for 2 handed driving, not the windows click, right click, wait for menu to pop up, look for option, right click for sub option, etc.

Power user of OS X would typically have hand on keyboard and hand on mouse. Some users can actually use the OS with minimal mouse usage if they prefer.

Budget one day to play around with it and get used to the little things that are different from Windows. Then budget another 6 days for kicking yourself that you didn't switch to Mac YEARS ago!

It took me about 2 days to get used to a Mac, myself being amazed by it the first night I had it. There are still things that pop up every once and a while that I didn't know, and they're all for the better I find. You might want to give yourself a month to really get used to the computer and all its tendencies, but after that, you should be proficient enough to use the computer and scoff at windows users

newappleboy said:

Took me a week to fall in love, and another couple weeks to start getting used to all the shortcuts and so forth. I'm still not as much of a power user as I was on a PC and have no clue as to any of the terminal commands or how the user's directory is organized, but that's not stuff you need on a daily basis. The learning curve for Mac is much better than that for Windows.

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I AGREE 100%, but every day I learn something new, and am impressed all over again

Hmm...

Suprised nobody pointed this video out called "Anatomy of a Mac" which gives you a very brief tutorial on the basics of using a Mac. Check this out from Apple and click on "Watch the video" near the top of that page:

http://www.apple.com/getamac/whymac/

Brains…
What’s inside a Mac? Only the world’s most advanced operating system and a suite of software that’s just as brilliantly designed as the computer itself. Watch the video

I learn new things all the time, but it probably took about 2 days to get comfortable. After about 4 months, I started doing the command-click motion on Windows PCs to do my copy and paste --- I think that ends up being Alt-C and Alt-V on a PC keyboard. It just doesn't work

I'd say 2 days, but you'll discover new stuff all the time and my have some trouble going back and forth (if you use a Windows machine at work, for example).

You might also find A New Mac Tip Every Day useful.

I've been on a mac now for a couple of years, so I really can't remember how long it took, but I finally convinced my younger brother who is in college to switch just a couple of months ago. He switched mid-semester so he was nervous about the time it would take him to be comfortable but he said that after three days he was completely fine.

new mac user

mxelre said:

Ok thank you very much guys! I'll wait for june 9th...you know just wanna make sure there isn't an update and I'll buy right after.

BTW, I know some programs will only work on windows, so what do you guys suggest is the best program for a partition of windows on the mbp?

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I use parallels for anything i can't do natively. To date that has only been using Visio and some practice exam software. I would suggest looking for mac alternatives on macupdate.com. I needed such things as a tabbed text editor, tftp server, bittorrent client, basic music editor, a facebook plugin for iphoto etc etc and I found them all on that website. All your web surfing, media and photo editing comes with OSX and ilife.

The Mac is pretty intuitive, but if you want to get into detail on OS X and find ways to maximize your productivity, I'd recommend David Pogue's "OS X-The Missing Manual." Lots of detailed info & tips. He also does a "Switching to the Mac" book.

Helpful tutorials:
http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/
http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/
http://www.apple.com/support/switch101/
http://www.oscot.com/mac-os-x/demystifying-mac-os-x-in-less-than-60-minutes.html

Hope these help. It's not hard, just different....
Morod