It must feel like a big plunge going from a
PC to a Mac. I know you have to get all new software. And with "so few" software choices, most people aren't willing to take the chance.
I use a PC at work, (Win2k) and OS X 10.3 Panther at home.
The difference is clear to me, but I spend a
lot of time on both machines. I can only imagine how the plunge must seem looking at it from your side, but after being on a Mac for many years I wouldn't hesitate to jump if for some reason I had only a PC. "Make me buy a Mac!" Boo hoo.
For sure, the PC is cheaper, but not near as
nice. You will see that in many ways. On the PC, Word opens each file in separate windows. They finally admitted that was a smarter way to use space that opening a gray rectangle and placing multiple windows inside that gray rectangle.
Excel, however, is still wedded to the gray
rectangle- and PowerPoint, and most apps are too. It's all they know. The whole function of having the inner window fill the outer window is a function that solves a problem that has never
existed on the Mac. You'll see other things,
like native support for PDF format- straight from the print dialog box- in Macs.
Windows users know that once you get far
from Microsoft, things don't work so well. That's because MS benefits from incompatibility. On other platforms, cross-compatibility is paramount. I routinely mail files home to
process them or open them because I can't do something on my work PC. Even my daughter's pink iMac can do many things my Win2k box can't, especially where pdf and graphics are concerned.
As far as the software selection, there are
many games that are not on the Mac, or they come late. I think that's about the only area where you will have trouble finding a program. By reading Macintouch and other web sites, and
using versiontracker, you'll find plenty of software for nearly everything else. The guy who runs tucows was interviewed once on a mac radio show, and he said the mac shareware he sees is far more polished than the PC apps he gets. 85% of Mac submissions pass testing and go straight on the tucows list. Only 60% of the PC stuff makes the cut. Especially now that mac developers
use the cocoa enviromment, you see all sorts
of neat apps coming out. Check out http://
www.stone.com/ for some leading edge stuff.
Some of these apps are so feature rich
you'll have trouble figuring out what it
WON'T do. Other apps like graphicconverter,
aquatint, and iView Media Pro are either not
available for the PC, or came years late.
These are very innovative or feature rich
apps. You may pay a little more for the
software (only sometimes) but it's worth
every penny if you prefer polished apps.
You'll pay more for the hardware, but you've
never seen hardware built as nice. I've had
FireWire since 1999. You'll get all sorts of
nice built-in features that you might think
you won't need, then one day you find you
can't get by without it. I'm still running
my 400MHz G4 and it really runs quite well
still. with OS X it's more stable by far
than my work machine with Win2k. I had an
old 25MHz Mac and asked a friend "This
ethernet thing, will I ever use that?" He
said "probably, it lets you talk to fast
modems and other computers" and this was
when nobody had two machnes at home. Nedless
to say, I soon had a home network with a
cable modem and was wondering how anyone
cound get by without Ethernet.
But if you are too nervous, just get a PC.
It will be familiar. Maybe not much of a
learning experience for you, but it will be
very familiar. If you get a Mac you'll have
to spend some time learning some new things.
You might even get interested in unix. It's
always running underneath OS X. When I want
a text list of a directory I always call up
a Terminal window and do it that way.
I've even found some handy command line
tools like joinPDF which are very handy,
especially when you consider that the print
dialog makes pdf files.
Here's a web site that summarizes advantages
to Macs:
http://www.macspeedzone.com/html/hubs/
partisan/
mac_vs_win.html
But if you get a PC, that's cool. Apple will
be around for many years, and you can always
change your mind the next time a virus wipes
your hard drive. I know it is irresponsible,
but I never ran anti-virus software until a
year ago. Never had a virus, the software
found nothing. Never saw one that would run
on OS X. Saw plenty that will run on a PC.
That's another category of apps that the PC
has the Mac beat hands down!
waterboy
