It is hard to read the news these days without seeing reference to Apple in some form or another. Recently Apple has attained the crown of being the most valuable company by market capitalisation in world history. The stock price has been driven upward by the frenzy surrounding the rumoured release of a new iPhone 5 pushing Apple’s stock to an all-time high – even though there has been no official product announcement or launch date from Apple.
Why the switch for me? Apple have such a a meticulous, product-focused extreme attention to detail that I haven’t seen before in other companies and that is what triggered me to look deeper at moving across from Windows to Mac OS X. Once I had done some research I realised it is far superior to Windows. I was a lifetime Windows/PC user till I bought my first Mac late last year. Now myself and my family are 100% fully converted to Apple. Yes it was slow going at first adjusting however for me there is no going back. I feel that a large portion of people are still using Microsoft purely because of inertia rather than product superiority.
Stuff is easier to do on a Mac. Your not wrestling with it. You are closer to media. Closer to Web 2.0. Blogging is easier. The Mac is quicker. Things are integrated. I love the continual innovation and the engineering. Elegant. I don’t use a mouse anymore thanks to superior gesture capabilities on a Mac.
The journey to get where I am with Apple started actually back in high school in the early 1980’s. A friend of mine, George, had a Apple 2 whilst the rest of us computer geeks where playing around with TRS80’s and Commodore 64’s. Surprisingly the Apple 2 could do colour graphics, high resolution graphics, could be programmed with Basic and had a games controller. Light years ahead of what we were using with other brands. Suffice to say we spent a lot of time over at George’s place using his computer as it was the most technologically advanced at the time. As time past the DOS operating system started to dominate and morphed into Windows 3.1 and soaked up everything else in its path in the desktop consumer market.
Fast forward to 2006, before the Apple iPhone was released, my wife and I were in New York and stumbled upon Apple’s Fifth Avenue retail store in Manhattan during an evening walk. It was ablaze with light and had a stream of people entering and leaving the store via a glass cube entrance. We had just seen a show on Broadway and with the time being around 11pm we were amazed at what a crowd there was at this time of night. Better take a look. We spent nearly 2 hours in the store looking at cool devices. What caught my attention was the Classic iPod. I had played around with mp3 players before but this iPod was fantastic. Streets ahead of anything I had seen as it could store video and had an innovative iPod click wheel. I was sold. Bought one for my wife as a Christmas present.
Next foray into Apple was in 2008. Working then as a Senior Manager in the Ericsson Network Operations Centre I had access to the best and latest phones. I had the opportunity to test the latest and greatest Nokia, Samsung and other brands. Still I was frustrated because the phones seem to be way behind where IT was. Syncing contacts, uploading mp3’s etc was a major exercise. The user interface was also clunky and woeful. Then came along iPhone. The iPhone completely solved issues that the other phones couldn’t and far exceeded what I as looking for in a phone. The design and attention to detail was outstanding.
Around 2009 my wife was frustrated with using a windows PC so I got her a MacBook Pro as I had heard it was easier to use than a PC. She used it fine without issues though I had never really considered looking into using one myself in any detail. Then last year I noticed a number of people around the office starting to use Mac’s. How could that be? What about using MS Office? Corporate email? What about other corporate apps? At that time I was using a 17” HP Pavilion laptop running Windows 7. It was an OK machine. Quad i7 processors. Got the job done. I was doing an engagement in Indonesia and a few times a day we had to move between our war room and the board room for presentations. Each time I closed the laptop to hibernate it would be an epic struggle to get it started again, sometimes taking 10 minutes. (The HP PC I had before that took 17 minutes to start!) Then one of the keys fell off in the lift. The laptop would be doing background activities, indexing or something and the fan would start up to cool down the CPU’s. The fan noise was loud to the point where I had to close the lid so as to not impact on the presentation in the board room. One of the guys in the office that I was working with had a MacBook Air 11″. He was doing all his work on it as well as Skype calls, sorting out photo’s and other personal activities… all on the one machine. He said his life has changed. Personally I thought the 11′ screen was way too small against my 17” screen but I must say the MacBook Air looked elegant.
OK. I was getting curious now. I researched and draw up a list of what Applications I was using on my PC and whether you can use them on a Mac and if not whether there was something equivalent. Here is that list:
- Internet Browser Bookmarks – OK
- Norton Internet Security – NOT REQUIRED
- MS Office – OK
- Dropbox- OK
- Skype – OK
- Handbrake – OK
- WinRAR – OK
- Divx player – OK
- gDoc pdf creator – equiv OK
- photoEd – equiv OK
- Core FTP Lite – equiv OK
- Pinnicle Studio 14 – equiv OK
- Picasa 3 – equiv OK
- Truecrypt – OK
- MS Project – viewer only with Steelray
- Visio Reader – plugin in browser only
So at the time only MS Project and Visio where going to be a challenge. I could live with that. Everything else was OK. If I got really stuck I could install Bootcamp or Parallels which runs Windows in a separate window and run those programs there if required. I wanted to avoid that as much as possible because if I was moving over to Mac I wanted to do it 100%. To date I haven’t yet found a problem with any application I used on the PC not working on the Mac.
Now I had to decide on what type of Mac laptop to buy. In the end I decided on a MacBook Air 13″. Wow what a fantastic machine. And what a profound change – HP Pavilion 17″ laptop running Windows 7 to an Apple MacBook Air 13″ running OS X – from plastic junk to a slick aluminium case. I do a huge amount of travel hence small and light is a necessity. I have 6 hours of battery life and with its small size can fit into an airline seat pocket easily. Further it doesn’t trip the circuit breaker in the airline seat like the HP used to do when you connect to power.
Moving everything over to the Mac from Windows was straight forward. No issues. All my devices worked immediately… no driver challenges. It finds your printers and everything else for you. MS Office 2011 was installed and is less than 1/2 the cost for the Mac than it is for Windows.
On my HP I had to have PointSec encryption for the hard-disk incase my laptop got lost/stolen. The equivalent for the Mac, FileVault, is built in. Just enable and away you go. Also you generally don’t need to worry about installing Anti-virus programs as OS X is a Unix derivative and is quite bulletproof. The reason it is hard to add a virus to an Apple machine is because it doesn’t have a Bios, Boot Sector or Registry system. The files that make an Application run on a Mac are self-contained as it doesn’t need to be spread around the machine to run. Some applications do, but that is the choice of the programmer. This means there is no where for a virus to hide as it is literally just a simple file structure with no hidden elements. It always frustrated me how insecure and vulnerable Windows was with spybots, spam ware, viruses and all the other nastys that self installed.
Things that you normally have to pay for with a Windows installation are free with a Mac or are included built into the OS. Want to print to PDF? No problem, built in. Backup? No problem use Time Machine. Built in. All happens in the background. Indexing and searching is very fast on a Mac. Mac OS X is much better than Windows at quickly finding what you need on your computer. One thing that really bugged me with Windows is if you wanted to upgrade say from XP to Windows 7 you were up for a decent cost. Home Premium Windows 7 in Australia is $199. The same leap with Apple’s OS X, say from Leopard to Lion is $29. On the Mac the OS is cheap and the Apps are cheap. Great system.
Apple is elegant, Everything works. Things are integrated. All works well in an eco-system. As Apple own both the hardware and operating system, Things sync. Calendars, contacts, photos and notes. Calendars for the whole family sync across family members iPhones and laptops.
When transitioning you do spend a while trying to work out how to do things the Apple way. For instance, when you are working with a text editor you look on the menu but can’t find a “Save” option. It saves as you go. How do you delete an application? Where is the uninstall? Oh, just drag it to the trash can. Done. It is a different philosophy. It is incredibly easy once you know it.
Now at work when I move my laptop between the war room and the boardroom I know that after the lid is closed on my Mac laptop and is hibernating I have a 100% chance my laptop will fire up to full speed in under 3 seconds when I open it back up.
Bliss.