To mac or not to mac?

Posted byJames 24 Comments on To mac or not to mac?

Have been toying with getting a MacBook Pro to replace an increasingly clunky Vaio.

But being a M$ user since, well, forever… I’ve gotta weigh up a heap of stuff.

First up, as this is basically my business and livelihood (in a very literal sense) what will the cost to me in figuring everything out all over again.

I mean, I can fix pretty much anything on XP… am I gonna be wasting hours/days/more on a Mac?

And will the change in OS be inspiring or just a pain in the arse.

And what of my beloved EditPlus :(

Bizarrely it’s the ipod touch that got me thinking of making the switch, it’s just so much fun to use.

Also, what are the chances of something new coming out that’s, well, better in the next 6 months?

Anyway, just weighing this up myself as much as anything, but if anyone has any thoughts I’d love to hear them!

24 replies on “To mac or not to mac?”

  3. I second on coda, the app is great. CSSedit is another must have program. My goal was not to install windows on my mac and I haven’t yet, but I think I have to just for some IE testing.

    -Jeff

  4. Whatabout ‘Find in Files’ though – I’m literally scared about not having that!

  7. Is the 2GB RAM enough on the 2.4Ghz model… I’ve usually got a lot of aps running at the same time but they’re not too full-on usually: FF/IE/Opera/Photoshop/FTP/Code editor/Word/Excel/iTunes

  8. Hehe, I actually had to check when you posted, i don’t think i had searched contents of files before now, I can tell you it’s lightnight fast. BTW, we are close to launching edmodo, we are hoping by the 29th.

    -jeff

  10. Congrats, we’ll give you a plug through Edublogs!

    You sure about that 2Gb?

  11. Thanks early for the plug :) We should start talking a partnership of some sort soon :)

    2gb should not be and issue, i have 4gb on my 2.4ghz iMac and have never had a single issue and plus i dedicate 2gb to my linux vmware install. I am in firefox, Photohop, terminal, ichat, twitterrific.

    -Jeff

  13. Personally I love my macs and PC’s but would urge you to consider Novell Suse desktop 10 and go open source and release yourself from the tyranny of the big two. Macs are well built, well designed, easy to use and expensive… PC’s on the other hand are almost the opposite in many respects, but as MS pushes us towards Vista by making XP unworkable or at best unreliable, I would urge you to go Open Source. We are moving our entire school in this direction and by 2010 we will be an open source school. At home as I make this transition I have two xp machines one imac and one macbook and a Novell Suse 10 machine. The Suse platform loads quickly and is stable as. To dual boot your Vaio will cost nothing while you evaluate…. Interested?

  14. Oh, definitely interested, heck, my business is entirely based on OS! But also really, really lazy :)

    Also, to be quite honest, there are some good things about proprietary software aren’t there? OS suits some things better than others.

    Oh, and I’m not much when it comes to command line!

  16. I made the switch, it was hard for 3-4 months, now I can’t go back to W any more.

  18. I revived an old Toshiba with Ubuntu 8.04 and LOVE it. No command line. Easy add and remove software. And I feel super cool when the African drums on start up get everyones attention.

    Improve your credibility James. Spare the world of the electro waste. Get with the play. If you’re gunna learn a new OS, make the right OS.

  19. I switched from the Mac to Windows Vista, it’s the first Windows I’ve been willing to put up with at home, it’s not so freaking ugly for starters.

    The number one reason to stay with Windows is if you are a keyboard navigator. Since the move to OSX, Mac OS has had an ongoing loss in keyboard navigation, which is no longer acceptable to me.

    Also, for non-Mac users, make sure you can live without an MDI interface (see Wikipedia). Some people can, some people can’t.

    They’re both good, for now, Windows Vista suits me best, on a 17″ high performance gaming Dell laptop.

  20. “Since the move to OSX, Mac OS has had an ongoing loss in keyboard navigation, which is no longer acceptable to me.”

    I’ve used a Mac since 1985 and the keyboard options have only gotten better, not worse. On top of that, OS X allows the user to add or alter almost any keyboard shortcut in the Finder AND in most programs.

    On the other hand, I guess I can live without an MDI interface (unless you mean MIDI, which I certainly have on my Macs).

  21. Get the Mac.

    Get 4GB – not Apple Ram, it’s much cheaper from a third party vendor.

    Get iWork. Ditch Office you won’t need it anymore.

    Get TextMate.

    Get VMWare Fusion for your XP jollies.

    That should cover you.

  22. Goodbye EditPlus, hello BBedit– gotta love a sofrware company called ‘Barebones’ who’s tagline is ‘software that doesn’t suck.’

    I have done web development for 15 years in it- only at the tip of its features is a powerful one- grep search and replace across multiple files– I have literally made sweeping edits to thousands of web docs.

    Whether is is OS X or some open source flavor unix, you then have the ability to run every web service on your laptop.

  23. You know, I looked through all of the above, I went into stores and salivated a bit, I even did a whole heap of research into application, and I so much appreciate all the feedback but in the end…

    … there is absolutely nothing that I could do on a Mac that I can’t do on Windows

    … I’d have to relearn literally dozens of applications inside out (to do exactly the same thing)

    … there are a fair few small apps that I run that unfortunately just don’t exist on Mac (i.e. MultiFTPsync)

    … Why would I ever want to switch between OSs..

    … I can get myself (and actually just did get myself) a lovely dual core same proc as Macbook pro Vaio with 4GB RAM for over $1000 less.

    Bottom line is it’d just be too much pain, with too few benefits and for too much money to change.

    New plan is to get a cheapish old macbook for the family and play with that for fun to see if it’s worth it.

    Utilitarianly (and still without a trace of cool), James

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