From PC to Mac and (Never) Back Again
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 9:13PM 
After much saving and many longing (some would say 'lusty') looks into the iStore at Central World, finally - I'm a Mac guy. A few weeks ago I became the proud owner of a 24-inch iMac with a 2.8GHz processor and 4GB of RAM. To say that it blows my old PC out of the water is a bit of an understatement; by the time my old computer died I might have been more productive if I'd taken up an abacus. But now I'm fully on the other side of the line, how does being a Mac guy in a PC world go down? This might get a bit lengthy.
Well, to be honest I did have a bit of a leg up when switching. When I was in film school back in the day, I majored in editing. I did the cut-and-tape thing with a razor blade and physical 16mm and 35mm film for a while, until the audience complained about blood on the film we got the latest new toy, the Avid nonlinear digital editor (read: editing computer). With its 35GB hard drive, we thought we'd never need another byte of memory as long as we lived.
Anyway, the Avid only ran on a Mac, so that's what I used, and I got pretty good at it. But as the technology got cheaper and started appearing on PCs, I was inevitably led down the Bill Gates path. I've been a PC guy since then, cursing whenever I used a friend's elegant Mac about how I'd have to go back to the clunky, boxy, buggy PC crowd.
Here it is in all its glory. The cable snarl exists only because I have an external drive back there... besides that, the only cord is the single power cable.In short, I'm really happy with my upgrade. Time was when a Mac would limit you to Mac-only programs that didn't run on a PC, but that time is past. Beyond the fact that most programs are at least somewhat cross compatible, Macs have their own version of Microsoft programs (like Word or Excel), and can also run Windows. Essentially, when you use your Mac, you can choose to use a Mac or a PC. Try that on your old Compaq and see if it doesn't explode like Rush Limbaugh at the Democratic convention.
The new operating system took a bit to get used to - X-ing out of a program doesn't close it until you choose 'close' from the task bar, for instance - and the CTRL key is replaced with the Command key when using keyboard shortcuts. I have to get used to looking at the top right for the clock instead of the bottom right, etc... but really, are any of these worth complaining about? The monumental increase in sleekness, the reduction of about 90% of my snaking, dust-covered PC cables and the shallow but inevitable jump up the 'cool' ladder more than makes up for it. There are some small issues with external hard drives being formatted the right way - MS-DOS FAT vs NTFS and more technical mumbo-jumbo that I don't really get - but a few minutes on Google will find you a few plugins that will completely bridge any gaps between a Mac and PC. I've had no problems at all transferring, copying or backing up anything.
From a post I wrote a few years ago. I wonder if I could make my preference any clearer?So, what don't I like?
I don't like the Mighty Mouse. For some reason I found that I couldn't be as precise as I could with my old Logitech mouse, so I went and bought a new one for $4 that works fine. Also, the AirPort wireless icon tells me that it's turned off, despite still being able to stream music to my living room AirPort Express device... guess it's not a big deal. I've also had some problems with Firefox hanging for about 45 seconds from time to time, although I'm pretty sure it's a problem with Firefox and not the Mac. As for iTunes - I hate it - it's a bully of a program and likes to do things its own way no matter what you tell it, and it can't handle my huge music library with much finesse. I used to use the awesome MediaMonkey, but they don't make it for Mac (yet), so now I'm using Songbird, which does a lovely job. One of the best things about these programs is that they treat your iPod like a removable drive - drag and drop any file you want on or off of the iPod.
The strangest thing I've experienced happened just the other day when I noticed some condensation inside my screen. I freaked out at first but after a bit of research online discovered that it's a known problem but only happens when it's particularly humid or the room temperature changes too quickly (it was very sticky that morning). Most of the advice suggested just leaving it to go away on its own, which it did after about an hour. Others, like this guy, suggest fixing it with a suction cup. I'm not that confident in my hacking skillz yet.
It's not so clear, but you can see the light condensation in the corner. Went away after about an hour and hasn't been back since.My favorite things about the iMac? Its size, for one... considering I grew up watching a 12-inch B&W Zenith TV, it's pretty sweet. They keyboard is tiny and very responsive, and the controls are very intuitive. Time Machine is a Godsend - I have all my most important files (which sadly, isn't many) automatically backing up to a little thumb drive plugged into the keyboard. In short, and to quote Apple - it just works. Highly recommended.
Reader Comments (3)
I'm not knocking your personal choices, but saying things like "To say that it blows my old PC out of the water is a bit of an understatement;" irks the crap out of me. Obviously your new Mac would perform much better than your 5-year-old PC. A new Windows PC would perform much better than your old PC, too.
Just had to say it.
To quit programmes, use command+q. One shot, one kill. No need to fart around with menus and mouse clicks.
To minimize a window, command+w.
I used to have a proper Gateway Server Twin Pentium 3 with EEC RAM ($20,000 when new, got it 2 years old, much abused extenally for $700 at auction) running win 2000 with SP1.
NOTHING I have ever come across ran as stable, I could even hotswap IDE drives!
The Mac gets its old rep for being stable from using quality parts like SCSI Drives, and the operating system being based on the ages old BSD (I think that is the correct name). While MS and Intel were just trying to sell the latest versions whether it worked or not and the parts were a higglety-pigglety of cheapest parts from China
Saying that I F'N hate WinXP and Vista, I will be going Mac or Linux next laptop, no way will Vista ever become a headache in my life.