I just transferred over an iphone 4s and an ipad from a pc itunes to a mac itunes last night. I thought it would be a nightmare but it actually went very smoothly. I thought from the old days that moving an iphone from a pc to a mac required erasing the iphone and losing text messages / game saves, etc, but I noticed that the newer itunes no longer shows the iphone as being windows or mac format like in the old days. so since I had my old iphone 4 laying around, I thought I'd plug it into my macbook air to see if it would try to erase everything on the phone and it didn't, but rather, sync'd up everything on the macbook without a hitch. I'll try to remember all of the steps that I took. I was moving from windows xp with my itunes library and all music on a network drive to a macbook air with all music and data on its local drive.
1) made sure everything was current in my windows itunes (latest itunes version, app updates, etc), sync'd up my iphone and ipad to created backups in case anything screwed up.
2) copied my entire "music" folder from my network drive to my macbook.
3) launched itunes on my mac while holding the option key and chose my itunes library in my user/music/itunes folder. when opening the library, itunes had all my playcounts, album covers, etc, but initially had exclamation points on all my music and apps because the itunes library.xml file had the old network paths for the location of all the files. I went into itunes -> preferences and changed the itunes library location to the new path on my macbook. after hitting ok on the preferences window, itunes on the mac started updating the library to the new path. exclamation points disappeared and everything looked perfect.
4) plugged the new iphone into the mac. itunes recognized it and didn't ask to erase everything. GREAT!! sync'd up the iphone and everything looked great.
a couple of miscellaneous things. my iphone used to sync photos with the "my pictures" folder on my pc. after syncing to the mac, the photo sync option was turned off. I have a copy of all my pictures on my mac too, under user/pictures, so turning photo sync back on on the mac and pointing to that path successfully sync'd all my local pictures to the iphone, replacing the copies from the pc. I used to sync my bookmarks with internet explorer on the pc, so I just changed the sync to safari bookmarks on the mac and had it overwrite my old bookmarks on the next sync.
everything is now on my mac exactly as it was on my pc but itunes on my macbook runs so much better!! also, having the iphone sync'd to the mac with all my music, apps, data, text messages and game saves is great!! I thought I'd have to lose some information in the transition. I was having lots of problems with itunes on the pc turning a lot of my app, books and music icons white and was just tired of all the problems. also, before transferring everything over, I was using chronosync to synchronize my music folder on the network drive to my mac which was a pain. I would sync, delete my itunes library.xml file, NOT the .itl file, and could change my path on the macbook like in step 3 and it would re-find all of my music / books / apps, etc. I'm not sure if deleting the itunes library.xml file was actually necessary, but it worked. itunes just created a new itunes library.xml file with the new paths after I changed the itunes library location in preferences. definitely take the time to switch it over. itunes works much nicer on my macbook. could very much be because I was moving from itunes on a network drive to a local drive but overall, the mac itunes seems much more stable so far. hope this helps!!
