Ditch and switch

• Article 42 of 53
• iCreate, September 2005
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 2.6MB

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You see them here. You see them there. You see those iPod ear buds everywhere. At any single moment of the day, there are at most two streets in the whole country where no one has a pair of white headphones in their ears – and that’s usually because someone forgot their iPod or they bought new headphones.

Thanks to the unequalled coolness of the iPod, more and more people are thinking that if the iPod is great and Apple makes the Mac, maybe Macs might be great, too. This “halo effect” is real: not only is Apple selling record numbers of Macs, a greater proportion of computer buyers is buying Macs.

The Mac mini is Apple’s main weapon in the war to acquire Windows users. Apple’s weapon used to be the iMac. The iMac is a powerful home computer that can slug it out with more expensive PCs with perfect ease. More than that, it’s beautiful, unlike so many PCs that are just plastic beige or black boxes made with cheap commodity parts, bristle with cables, and make so much noise you’d think they were auditioning for the Farnborough Air Show.

But the iMac does weigh in at nearly a £1,000. Compare that with a generic PC-U-Like package weighing at £300 or £400 quid and pretty it may be, but most people will head instantly for the PC, rather than the “more risky” Mac. It didn’t matter how hard Apple and others pointed out that it looks rubbish, doesn’t have all the features of an iMac and plays Quake so slowly it might as well be Quake By Committee. Even pointing out the superior quality of the Mac’s bundled software didn’t help (and we’re talking titles you’d actually want to use, rather than ‘Learning the Balalaika with Brad Pitt’, ‘Barney and friends find out about total quality management best practice’ or one of the other easily chuckable pieces of rubbish that usually comes with PCs). Cheap as Intel chips won almost every time.

But the Mac mini has changed that with its £350 price tag, impossibly small, beautiful shape and environmentally-friendly message – buy this computer and you can reuse your old keyboard, monitor and mouse rather than throw them away. Along with the iPod, it has convinced more than a few second-time computer buyers that a Mac is worth trying.

You may ask, if you’re a Windows user, with the Mac and the PC now on a level playing field in terms of price, what has the Mac got in its favour to make a switch worthwhile? Well, Mr/Ms Windows, we’re going to answer that question right now.

The first and possibly the oddest attraction is lack of choice. What? Lack of choice? Surely choice is good. Well, yes and no. Anyone who’s ever tried to buy a PC will know what a bewildering range of choice there is. Should you go with a more expensive name-brand, like Dell or HP, or a cheaper no-name brand like Epcbuyer or, erm, Tiny (oh dear)? Should you go with an Intel or an AMD chip? What kind? A Celeron? A dual Xeon? A Pentium-M? What kind of motherboard? How many USB ports? What’s the cache on it? What graphics card does it have? Will it be shared-memory graphics? What are the RAM chip speeds? How many PCI slots will it have? And on and on on.

With a Mac, it’s simpler. Worried about cost? Mac mini for you, Sir/Ma’am. Want something a bit more powerful that comes with a keyboard, mouse and monitor? Buy an eMac: everything you need and dirt cheap at only £549. For a laptop, pick an iBook or PowerBook. For a desktop, an iMac or Power Mac should suit you nicely. Not sure about the difference? Pick the “i” range for consumer-power and a white look, “Power” for professional-power and a metallic look. You don’t have to worry about optional extras such as FireWire, Ethernet, WiFi or sound cards since all Macs come with them built in. The only spec question you need to think about is whether to go for “Good”, “Better” or “Best” to let you pick the model you need for your budget. That’s it. And really, shouldn’t it always be like that?

Number two reason for buying a Mac is OS X. OS X is to Macs as Windows is to PCs: it’s what gives the computer its “personality”. The trouble with Windows though, is that it’s like a younger version of OS X that’s been licking the paint off lead soldiers all its life. You never get the feeling Windows is working with you to help you accomplish your goals. It’s more like you’ve managed to get things done despite Windows. All those helpful “wizards”? Nine times out of ten they lead you down the garden path to a £1 per microsecond helpline.

With OS X, it’s different. Everything just works. It’s easy. Either you plug things in and they work or you install the software and they work. Even installing software is easier. Just drag the application’s icon to your hard drive and that’s it installed, for the most part.

Everything in OS X is pretty consistent across programs, thanks to Apple’s rules for developers, so you don’t spend ages looking for the same options in different programs. Everything is easy.

Ease of use isn’t the only place where OS X beats Windows hands down. The latest version, OS X 10.4 aka Tiger, has a range of high-end features that Windows won’t even think about having until next year with “Windows Vista” – assuming, of course, that Microsoft doesn’t remove the three or four new features it still has left from its original plans for Vista. Spotlight lets you find any file or text within a file within seconds, wherever it is on your computer, while you’re still typing. That’s a feature Microsoft has been working on for over a decade and they’re still not going to be able to get it to work in time for Vista.

Core Image, Core Video and Core Sound make DirectX and other Windows multimedia facilities look like a kindergarten’s potato prints. Any Mac developer can include breathtaking ripple effects, picture transparencies and anything else from this massive toolbox of Hollywood special effects with little effort; Tiger, in fact, is littered with them.

Then there are things like Dashboard that not only look great but make your life so much easier. Press a single button and a host of gadgets known as widgets will leap onto your desktop. These will give you your contacts, the weather, flight times and a horde of other things. You can download and install your own widgets, too. There are over 1,000 widgets that can give you TV listings, train times, a live stream over the Internet of Radio 4: you name it, someone’s probably created a widget for it. There’s just nothing like that in Windows.

The iCal calendar software that comes with every Mac lets you plan your days, publish your diary online for others to see and to subscribe to other people’s calendars. There are now thousands of calendars for sporting events, movie releases and other areas of interest that you can subscribe to with iCal. Yet another OS X program, iSync, lets you synchronise your iCal calendars – and your contacts - with mobile phones, PDAs, iPods and other devices. Do you see how much useful stuff you get with a Mac?

Now, what do you use your computer for? Maybe work. Maybe games. Ultimately though, it’s the big three most people use home computers for: email, web surfing, and entertainment. Let’s look at those one at a time.

OS X’s built-in Mail program is immune to all those Windows email viruses that keep disrupting our lives. It has a junk mail filter that learns as time goes on what’s junk and what’s not. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to set it to just delete anything that looks like spam mail, it’s so good.

Surfing the web, you’ll be safer with a Mac than with Windows. Even Internet Explorer on a Mac is safer than Internet Explorer on a PC. Safari, the built-in web browser of OS X, is faster and more compatible than Internet Explorer and makes the web look one hell of a lot more attractive than IE does, thanks to OS X’s built-in text and graphics functions.

It’s with entertainment that OS X really excels. As you’d expect, there’s a built-in DVD player. There’s also iTunes, the best music player and organiser for any platform, installed without a single download.

But the biggest Mac advantage is iLife, a collection of iTunes and four other Apple applications: iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, and Garageband. iPhoto is the number one program for organising your photo collection. It downloads pictures directly from the vast majority of digital cameras without any extra software, lets you organise them, add comments, enhance them and remove blemishes. Best of all, you can order prints directly from within iPhoto, either loose or in specially made linen books.

iMovie HD, as the name suggests, is a home-movie editing tool that works even with high definition cameras. Just plug your camcorder into your Mac and iMovie can control it directly and download your movies. Anyone can learn to use iMovie, just by playing around with it for a few minutes.

Once you’ve finished editing your movie in iMovie, you can send it to your friends, publish it on the web or make your own DVD with iDVD. It’s as easy to use as iMovie: just drag and drop your movies to the pre-set templates to create stylish menu screens.

Garageband is going to be the start of many a band’s success in years to come. Take any tunes, then mix them and cut them to create your own tunes. Plug your instrument into your Mac and use one of the many hundreds of musical instrument presets to create new tunes: maybe you’d like to use your Mac or your electric guitar as a piano. Maybe you’d like to use your keyboard as a guitar or an organ instead.

iLife comes free with every Mac. How many would it cost you to put all these programs together on Windows? A lot.

Now these are pretty big carrots. But you might have some lingering doubts. After all, you’ve already got a PC with a printer, scanner, camera and a dozen other things that won’t work with a Mac already. You won’t be able to buy software for a Mac anywhere – you couldn’t see any in Dixons or PC World – and the software you do have won’t work on a Mac either. There’s no Mac repairs place you know of, although there are plenty of PC repairs places locally. In other words, is it worth this leap in the dark?

Most of these problems are just myths. Just about any printer will work with a Mac straight away, as will most cameras and other peripherals. Check in the box they came in and you’ll almost always find a CD with Mac software on it, or a page in the manual saying you don’t need any software for it to work with the Mac.

As for software, don’t bother with PC World or Dixons. They may stock Macs but they usually know next to nothing about them. Requests for information (true story) about how to network a Mac and a PC will receive sage advice such as “you can’t. They use different processors. You’ll probably need a Windows NT server.”

John Lewis is a good high street store for Mac software, as are the new Apple stores opening around the country, but your best places to look for Mac software is online, at such places at Cancom (www.cancomuk.com), the Apple Store (www.apple.com/ukstore) and Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk). Look in the back of iCreate for other stores, where you’ll also find Mac repair stores: hopefully you’ll never need to use one.

Once you investigate, you’ll find that there’s a whole wealth of Mac software out there, including some of the best games and business packages. All the big boys are there: Microsoft Office, the entire Macromedia range, virtually the entire Adobe range, research tools like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Check your existing software as well: sometimes you’ll find that a CD will contain both a Mac and a Windows version of the program and you just never realised it.

If the cost of new software puts you off, remember that some companies will let you “crossgrade” for free or at minimal cost. More often than not, even if you’re not eligible for a free crossgrade, you’ll at least be eligible for the upgrade price, rather than the full cost of the product.

If you can’t find the program you want or an equivalent, there’s always one of the Windows emulators, such as Virtual PC, which can run Windows programs on your Macs. They’re nowhere near as fast as an actual PC, but if you really want a choice of programs, then why not get a machine that can run both Mac and Windows applications, not just Windows applications?

If you do the right thing and buy a Mac, you’ll probably be wondering how to get your files off your PC and onto the Mac. For those that want an easy life, there’s Move2Mac (http://www.orlogix.com/prodinfo.php?pn=m2m) which comes with its own high-speed USB cable for transferring data and settings directly from your PC. Otherwise, there’s all manners of ways to get stuff across: DVDs, iPods, hard drives. Macs have built-in Windows file sharing, which is often a good way of migrating files or getting the two systems to work on the same network. Apple has a useful page on how to migrate data at http://www.apple.com/switch/howto/.

In fact, the hardest part of the switch won’t be getting the files across; it’ll be using the files at the other side. Movies, music, photos and other common files such as PDFs will work without hassle. If you have any Windows Media files, there’s a Windows Media Player for the Mac that’s free to download, although it can’t play all the same files as its Windows counterpart. While most programs, such as Photoshop, Filemaker and Dreamweaver, use the same file formats on Windows and OS X, others won’t. Most will have an export option that converts data into formats that other programs can understand. There are also utilities for converting some data formats, with Maclink Plus Deluxe being the best (and most expensive). Ultimately though, there could be a few formats that will give you problems, with Microsoft’s Access being the most obvious barrier to a clean switch.

Email is the other usual migration issue. Outlook and Outlook Express store their contacts and emails in odd formats and getting the data out of these formats and into Mac email programs can be hard. Outlook2Mac (www.littlemachines.com) is a commercial program for making the switch and there are several others that perform similar functions. Since Netscape can import Outlook and Outlook Express mail and uses the same mailbox format on both platforms, it’s a useful conversion tool.

Now we’re not going to pretend that the Mac experience is absolutely perfect in every detail and that making the leap from Windows to the Mac will be seamless and completely cost-free. If you’re a big games fan, you’re probably better with a PC or a console rather than a Mac. There are certain fields of work where it is difficult to find Mac software and there are some must-have packages in these areas that just don’t have a Mac version.

Nevertheless, with perhaps a little pain, you’ll be able to make a lot of gain. If there are no absolute dealbreakers that prevent you moving to a Mac, we think you’ll see the benefits very quickly. No viruses, no Trojans, no bots. Software that’s easy to use. Programs that fit into your lifestyle straight away, with no real equivalents in the Windows world. The Mac way has a lot going for it. With the Mac mini going for a song, you can try a Mac for almost the same price as an iPod. We’re sure you’ll enjoy the switch.

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