SWITCHERS ONLY: What might we NOT like about switching?

[mmulin]

Wow. I could see this being a pain in the butt when we're used to just clicking on 'Close Window' and we're done.

Apple uses a different metaphor. Windows belong to an application. An application might have different windows or none. So, closing a window just closes the window. To quite the application, the common options are Cmd+Q, right-click on the icon in the dock and Quit, or use the File menu and Quit.

Are you guys sure that switching is really "worth it"? (serious question)

Depends on your needs. For a general user with no specific Windows centric needs, I recommend OSX for the value of easy maintenance and less hustle in general.

 

[Sounds Good]

Well guys... call me crazy, but I am once again considering a Mac purchase. Yeah, I know.

The new more powerful Macbook Air is very tempting, and I just love the new "Tap Tap Zoom" feature in Lion (makes a 135 ppi screen much easier to handle for my aging eyes).

Ahhh... we'll see.

 

[AddictedToNoise]

Internet Explorer

Personally I LOVE the Mac. My wife and I bought our MacBook earlier this year so that she'd have reliable laptop for her college work. I "tinker" with music and video editing, so naturally I enjoy Garage Band and iMovie, etc.
However, I should have done my research. I'm even in IT field, so I feel pretty embarrassed to admit this. There are several websites that she has to use for her both her college work and her day job work that will only work with Internet Explorer. She had issues with some of the functionality on the FAFSA (Student Loans) website with both Firefox and Safari, problems with some of the test taking software for one of her online classes and was unable to view her online pay stub on the website of her employer. In her words the MacBook has been "one very expensive facebook browser".
And yes, to answer your question, I did try Winebottler. I've done research on some other solutions, but to no avail. Any suggestions though would be greatly appreciated.
I knew that 10 years ago there were websites that were IE specific, but had no idea that those are still around...This has caused me a lot of grief. I just wanted something with a more reliable OS than Windows so that she wouldn't encounter issues while doing her homework.

 

[Young Spade]

Personally I LOVE the Mac. My wife and I bought our MacBook earlier this year so that she'd have reliable laptop for her college work. I "tinker" with music and video editing, so naturally I enjoy Garage Band and iMovie, etc.
However, I should have done my research. I'm even in IT field, so I feel pretty embarrassed to admit this. There are several websites that she has to use for her both her college work and her day job work that will only work with Internet Explorer. She had issues with some of the functionality on the FAFSA (Student Loans) website with both Firefox and Safari, problems with some of the test taking software for one of her online classes and was unable to view her online pay stub on the website of her employer. In her words the MacBook has been "one very expensive facebook browser".
And yes, to answer your question, I did try Winebottler. I've done research on some other solutions, but to no avail. Any suggestions though would be greatly appreciated.
I knew that 10 years ago there were websites that were IE specific, but had no idea that those are still around...This has caused me a lot of grief. I just wanted something with a more reliable OS than Windows so that she wouldn't encounter issues while doing her homework.

Parallels 6 or Bootcamp; bootcamp allows dual booting into Windows itself (most people choose W7) and you can continue from there.

Parallels allows you to run your own VM or the bootcamp partition as a virtual machine on top of OS X; allowing you to have the entire experience without having to restart the computer; you have a slight performance hit depending on the type of machine you have though.

Bootcamp is cheaper. You have to buy the W7 disk to use Parallels so you can't really have that without the option of Bootcamp.

 

[vitzr]

One off the top of my head is that everything costs money application wise, there is very little freeware.

Welcome to the premium world of Apple where paying the company always comes first.

After all, Apple boasts about getting 30% margin, now you know where it comes from

 

[GrendelsBane]

Well, I've just read all ten pages of this thread. Some great stuff in here. No one seems to know the trick to get around the "no cut in Finder" issue. Well, here you go:

Right click and choose Copy
Go to the destination and right click, then hold down Option and you'll discover a "Move Item Here" command in the context menu!

Better still (remembering the Option trick): Cmd C to Copy, then Cmd Opt V to Move

 

[Young Spade]

Welcome to the premium world of Apple where paying the company always comes first.

After all, Apple boasts about getting 30% margin, now you know where it comes from

That's only in the App store(?) but I get your point; I've spent more within 3 weeks on applications than I have over the course of years on Windows.

Well, I've just read all ten pages of this thread. Some great stuff in here. No one seems to know the trick to get around the "no cut in Finder" issue. Well, here you go:

Right click and choose Copy
Go to the destination and right click, then hold down Option and you'll discover a "Move Item Here" command in the context menu!

Better still (remembering the Option trick): Cmd C to Copy, then Cmd Opt V to Move

Or you could just get TotalFinder and have cut and paste built into the OS, with the help of the program of course. Well that and tabbed browsing and a slew of other features.

But yea, if you don't have the money, keyboard commands are the way to go.

 

[jegbook]

And yes, to answer your question, I did try Winebottler. I've done research on some other solutions, but to no avail. Any suggestions though would be greatly appreciated.

I take it Winebottler did not work?
Had you thought about Crossover Mac? (essentially the same product, but I'm pretty sure they indicate IE as a supported application)

My understanding was that these tools worked quite well. Is the issue not with IE running within OS X but that there are other plugins and scripts that are needed as well?

With Parallels or Fusion (from VMWare), you could run Windows 7 as a VM, and both have modes that more or less allow you to run Windows applications and hide the Windows part (Coherence in Parallels and Unity in Fusion).

Other options: Buy Windows 7 and run the MacBook as Win 7 only; Boot Camp to boot into Win 7 when IE is needed; sell the MacBook and get a Lenovo.

I wouldn't worry about Windows 7 being more of a hassle. It's really quite a nice operating system and I haven't found any particular issues. I like OS X and Win 7 for different reasons and find each strong and weak in different areas. I tend to use OS X for my personal needs and Win 7 for business needs.

Cheers and good luck!

 

[andrewlgm]

One off the top of my head is that everything costs money application wise, there is very little freeware.

I'll have to agree with that. Even today I still find that most apps that I may be interested in cost a lot of money. But out of the box, Mac os X offers almost everything a new user could ever need, and "some" more without the need to download bunches of software from the net. Having said that, the amount of free and great software for windows - and linux for that matter - cannot be beat. Probably a lot of people will not agree. But that's my own experience. When I first used a linux repository years ago I was blown away. Now we have the app store which is also great, but again, gotta pay for most of the stuff.

 

[r0k]

I'll have to agree with that. Even today I still find that most apps that I may be interested in cost a lot of money. But out of the box, Mac os X offers almost everything a new user could ever need, and "some" more without the need to download bunches of software from the net. Having said that, the amount of free and great software for windows - and linux for that matter - cannot be beat. Probably a lot of people will not agree. But that's my own experience. When I first used a linux repository years ago I was blown away. Now we have the app store which is also great, but again, gotta pay for most of the stuff.

I notice this as well. Sure there is a lot of excellent freeware available for OS X but more often than not when I'm looking for something specific, I find people offering to sell it rather than give it to me. Perhaps some of this is due to the relatively small market share of the OS X platform. Shareware authors need to charge more when they are dealing with a smaller audience. I also find a lot of abandonware. In the last week alone I've stumbled across half a dozen apps that are "no longer in development", "no longer supported" or "converted to open source" but sadly won't build on the SDK I'm using because their last update was several years ago.

I expect this situation to get better. The OS X app store will grow and more quality freeware will show up over time. MacUpdate is also an excellent source of freeware but it also has a lot of examples of shareware and demo/commercial software.

 

[markintosh]

Only One thing...

You won't like that you waited so long

 

[Kristan]

One annoyance I've yet to find a solution for is refreshing a folder in finder.

I do a lot of work on shares from other machines, and other people put files on there for me to work on, yet I can't seem to figure out how to force finder to rescan the folder so I can see them, and it doesn't seem to want to do it itself!

I still get keyboard shortcuts messed up (specifically cursoring left and right over a word - CTRL-LEFT and CTRL-RIGHT on windows) but that's probably because I use both windows and OSX daily. I'll get there in the end.

Overall though, I much prefer my mbp to anything else I've owned computer wise. It helps it's substantially faster than anything else I've ever owned too

For most people though the OS is just a tool to launch your apps and then hide away in the background. As long as your apps are available on either, it's just a choice of hardware really. Features like built-in gestures, time machine etc. are all nice things OSX has, whereas win 7 has... ummmm.. actually nothing I miss now I think about it

PS - Install Quicksilver, you don't need a dock or start menu then, a couple of keystrokes and you're away.

 

[Wrathwitch]

For me it was and still is:

Codex issues. Finding Codex software to watch anime.

Yeah I know there is vlc etc.

Also, was having to find mac specific soft ware and learn how to use it, ie: handbrake (which is really neat) but I was used to the Windows system and it was a learning curve.

I don't like how you have to take a photo and to resize it you have to export it to another folder to modify it. I think you should be able to modify it in iPhoto imo!

 

[Young Spade]

You won't like that you waited so long

However, his waiting will allow him to appreciate it that much more

I know I do; as a power user going to a MB was the best thing that I have ever done.

PS - Install Quicksilver, you don't need a dock or start menu then, a couple of keystrokes and you're away.

You should definitely give Alfred a try if you use the launcher for anything other than applications. What I love about Alfred is that it gives you a horizontal box with options that scroll down; it's great for finding files/documents, and programs as it lets you view most if not all of the document name and you can choose out of the customizable bunch with keyboard commands.

 

[Sounds Good]

I still get keyboard shortcuts messed up (specifically cursoring left and right over a word - CTRL-LEFT and CTRL-RIGHT on windows)

I'm been "playing" on Macs at the Apple store and quickly noticed that this ^^^ is driving me nuts. I'm so used to doing it on Windows (many, many times per day!) that I'm not sure I'd be happy with the change.

 

[Vindicator]

Also Stability wise OS X is much more stable than Windows and Apps rarely crash (with the exception of MS Office when it was first released!).

As with all things Microsoft they take an idea and turn it into bloatware! Almost every MS app I have used feels bloated even Office on the Mac

I use windows 7 and osx about almost 2 years and the most crashed app is safari. App actually rarely "crash" on both platfrom, it's not like on ios or android when app crash often due memory management. it dont have anything to do with OS stable.

bsod or kernel panic even rarer, 99% is about hardware problem.(2 for my dell and 1 for my macbook in 2 years)
And the most bloated software is itunes for windows.

sorry for my english

 

[skottichan]

For me it was and still is:

Codex issues. Finding Codex software to watch anime.

Yeah I know there is vlc etc.

Also, was having to find mac specific soft ware and learn how to use it, ie: handbrake (which is really neat) but I was used to the Windows system and it was a learning curve.

I don't like how you have to take a photo and to resize it you have to export it to another folder to modify it. I think you should be able to modify it in iPhoto imo!

I use Perian for my codex needs. I've yet to run across a fan sub it didn't like.

 

[jazzmankg]

I'm was a complete Mac virgin when I switched a couple of months ago but some of the small things that still annoy me.

1. Pressing delete when you've selected a file in finder doesn't delete the file. You've gotta use the context menu or <gasp> actually drag it to the garbage.

2. It's kinda' weird that the menu bar shows at the top of the screen and not the window. When you have alot of windows open I sometimes go into the menu bar thinking it belongs to another program than what I intended.

3. There's no ".." button in finder(i.e. go one level up a directory structure)

4. Not having an actual uninstall program procedure kind of makes me paranoid.

I do love the magic mouse and obviously Macs look slicker than PCs so overall I guess I'm satisfied and I'm sure any reasonable person would be as well but from what I've seen of Windows 7 I would think most reasonable people would be happy with that too.

I'm 2 weeks into my switch. I have grown thru win 3.11, win 95 thru xp and beyond. I can't stand vista or windows 7. I agree with these point 1-4. I feel the same way.

1. I got used to see a directory structure so if you can find stuff if you lost track(not that windows vista could find anything...but xp was fine). When you find stuff thru search.. I'm still not sure exactly "where" geographically it resides on the hard drive

2. programs not available in mac that are in pc. $ or problematic
Simple tasks.. for example video conversion. I do youtube uploads of family. I'm at the point of skipping it and doing via pc. iMovie is not making it for me although I see the options as more advanced potentially. Very few codecs available out of the box. only mp4 and it's a problem so far for IMovie

3. x11. Love the little console program for running my precious MS Word program. However I haven't figured out exactly to stop it from running when I want to download a true mac version app. That happened with firefox for mac download as well as 7zip.

4. The great alt tab equivalent is cmd tab. However I find that although it can toggle thru the open apps it often doesn't switch to the program. Sometimes it will after restart

5. Uninstall. Sure you can drag to the trash. But seldom is it just in one place. I downloaded some app that was supposed to assist in collecting the various pieces.. but it doesn't work at all. I frequently try out programs and uninstall to get the best one. getting a little cluttered.

The thing I like most about mac is how seldom it freezes and how efficient it is in terms of processing. I find I can almost do limitless tasks without compromising the memory.

 

[Young Spade]

5. Uninstall. Sure you can drag to the trash. But seldom is it just in one place. I downloaded some app that was supposed to assist in collecting the various pieces.. but it doesn't work at all. I frequently try out programs and uninstall to get the best one. getting a little cluttered.

The thing I like most about mac is how seldom it freezes and how efficient it is in terms of processing. I find I can almost do limitless tasks without compromising the memory.

The best way to do it is one that requires no program at all.

http://guides.macrumors.com/Uninstalling_Applications_in_Mac_OS_X

I used to use programs myself until I found this solution. Takes maybe, 20 seconds but you get EVERY file; even the programs leave some behind.

But I completely agree in terms of processing power and speed; right now I have 9 spaces, all of them holding 1-3 programs or windows. The top half are used for entertainment or whatever and the bottom half I devote to school work and things i do in the classroom.

Everything just stays up and running; nothing is ever quit, closed, or minimised because I can simply switch to a different space and/or move things around.

That's one of the reasons I haven't gone to Lion yet: They ruined spaces + expose.