Top 10 Pros & Cons of switching from Windows to Mac OS X

Eugene · Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:07 am Post subject:

# Pro - The GUI: It didn't take me long to get used to it. It is super smooth, even on the cheap Mac Mini. On a 19", the available screen space is used more efficiently - the shared menu bar and the dock being the main reasons. Everything looks nicer too, from the fonts, the icons to the built-in controls (scroll-bars, drop-downs, etc). It makes Windows XP look very late-nineties.

# Con - Home and End keys: They don't work the same as Windows. They don't work the same as Linux. They don't work the same as a freakin' terminal connected to a main-frame. The official keys are Command-Left and Command-Right. I'm starting to get used to them. But now I try to use them when I work on a Windows machine!

# Pro - Front Row: The Mini came with an Apple Remote. I can active Front Row using the remote or using Command-Esc. It is not a 100% perfect media centre, but it is so much closer than using Windows Media Player (or The Core Media Player or VLC for that matter.) I haven't tried Windows Media Centre Edition, but I can't imagine that it could be this slick.

# Pro - It's Unix!: You've got a very, very nice GUI but under the hood is good ole' Unix. It's nice to get to a decent shell for once, rather than being stuck with the Windows command prompt. Compiling open-source applications is far easier than on Windows. (Tip: if you use Microsoft's Remote Desktop to talk to your old Windows PC from your Mac, like I do, take the time to compile rdesktop. It is so much faster! (Microsoft's tool is PowerPC and single-session only as well.)

If you can't get rdesktop to compile, then give the CoRD project by Craig Dooley a go. It is not as fast as rdesktop, and presently doesn't support full-screen. But it does support multiple simultaneous sessions, which is one over Microsoft's tool

# Con - It's Unix!: If you are familiar with it, Unix is great. But if you aren't, then I can imagine that may be a bit daunting. Luckily, for most users Apple has shielded most of the scary Unix details. In the Finder you can't even see directories like /bin, /dev, /usr, etc.

It is only when you open the Terminal and get to a shell that you see all the ancient Unix directory structures, combined with Apple's more hip and happening directory names like Applications, System, etc. (The folks at Apple aren't afraid of using upper-case letters once in a while!) I can hear you *nix fan-boys seething, but you have got to admit that *nix has been around a long time and not everyone can agree where everything belongs. "Does it belong in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin? I don't know, Boss, let's let the user decide when they run configure!"

# Pro - Graphic Designers will talk to you: The company where I work has developers and designers working closely together. Designers using Macs, wearing $300 dollar jeans. Developers using Windows PCs, wearing $20 jeans (but earning much higher salaries).

When you can talk about the Mac with a designer they will suddenly like you 50% more. It may sound stupid, but the results are there.

# Con - Games: Go into your closest computer games store and flick through the titles in the 'Mac Games' section? Sorry, can't you find the Mac section? Ask the sales assistant - maybe they have something out the back...

# Pro - Lots of other nice little things: You can drag text off of a web-page and onto the desktop. A text file is automatically created with the stuff you dragged. That is nice.

In the tree view in the Finder you can multiple-select any file you see, even if they are in different folders. This means that you can copy three different files from three different folders to one spot in one action. That is nice.

Right-click on a word and you can look it up in the Dictionary, search your machine using Spotlight, search Google, or do many other things. This works nearly everywhere. That is nice, but it would be even nicer if it worked everywhere.

# Con - Can't change the default global search: The Right-click that I just mentioned searches using Google. The search in Safari, my new favourite browser, also uses Google. I don't want it to use Google, I want it to search using Google Australia because it gives me results that are more relevant to where I live. In Firefox and even Internet Explorer it is fairly simple to switch default search engines. But where is the preference for this on the Mac or in Safari? Has Google already bought Apple? (Yes you can change it, if you play with some binary files - but you shouldn't have to play with binary files to change a simple setting like that.)

# Pro - It is Apple: Apple makes quality stuff. 99% of what they make is good. I have a couple of Apple IIe computers from the 80s and they still work nicely, even after being left out in the rain. The iPod is not wildly successful just because of brilliant marketing. It is successful because it is an awesome little machine. It was not the first or the last to market, but it is still the best.

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