keithhr said:
I have an older Dell desktop (2002), a Dell Inspiron lap top, an HP Photosmart all in one printer, fax, copier and scanner and a Samsung laser printer.
You won't have trouble with the hp PhotoSmart AIO, but you may with the Samsung, depending on which model it is. If it has the PostScript cartridge installed or supports PostScript in some way it should work no problemo. I've just run into trouble with Samsung not providing drivers for the Mac for their older lasers, (don't know about current ones but willing to look) so that's why I'm asking. Can you please tell us more details on your peripherals?
Here's a general rundown:
A USB keyboard & mouse will function, but the Mac keyboard has its special keys just as the PC has its "Windows" key etc. You might want to invest in a Mac keyboard. You'll like using a 2-button mouse on the Mac, though, so if you're happy using your present trackball/mouse/pointingThing then keep it and you'll be able to right-click to act on things in the Mac world nicely. Right-clicking is not a near necessity as it is in Windows, but it is convenient.
Display -- Most Macs come with DVI out, but many also come with a VGA adapter for that port, so you're probably safe. Mini DVI ports can have mini-to-full adapters, so I guess I should really phrase it as ALL macs have DVI output, but you might need to spend $20 to use your current display. (Even the current iMac's have output, so you can span your desktop onto a second display if you want to use both internal & external for even more space for CPF.)
Ethernet's Ethernet, so as James said above if your cable modem has Ethernet-output, you'll be able to plug in your Mac and use it. Routers/switches/WiFi etc are all cross-platform standards, which is to say that the Mac works just as well. There are some gotcha's with WPA (or is it only for WEP?) encryption on WiFi that are nit-picky because the 2 platforms perform the hash differently, so you'd need to choose a suitable length passkey when setting it up, but in general it's no problem.
Funny enough, for digital cameras it really is a little like the ad that Apple's running. Just plug in your digital camera or video recorder not bothering with drivers. I bet it'll work and pull up iPhoto for you no problem. Open iMovie and your video recorder should come up.
BTW -- Apple's "FireWire" is exactly PC's "1394" (IEEE 1394b). Same thing, cables & all, but most PC's use the smaller version connector. You might need to get a cable with a different shaped plug.
You can check out the
switching pages at Apple for more information. There's a link named "hook me up" that'll lead to telling you what peripherals will work, specifically there's on for
printers. (No Samsung there
) Cameras are listed on that "hook me up" page too.
And what the heck -- in the near future you'll be able to get Windows to run on your Mac simultaneously if you still needed to run that one last app that isn't as good on the Mac (QuickBooks Pro/Premier and need to round-trip with your accountant).
Hope this helps!
Oh! one more thing -- if you're looking for a good price you can get refurb'd stuff
here ("Special Deals" lower left corner) that's the real thing and warranted. You'll probably want to get AppleCare no matter what you get, refurb or not.
If you buy the Mac at the Apple retail store (meaning brick & mortar) they'll do things like transfer your files for you from your PC.
And don't bother trying to get served at a Genius Bar without being a ProCare member -- it' usually takes
hours to get served, no exaggeration. Just get ProCare and the retail store (offered retail-only) will provide you with one-on-one training sessions, reservations capability for the Genius Bar, faster repairs (sometimes next day), etc. $100/yr. The ProCare and AppleCare is sorta like Dell's Gold support, only Dell's cost about $300 for 3 years whereas Apple wants $300 for AppleCare (3 yrs) plus $100/yr for ProCare but in exchange you get personal training.
If you go to a store they'll push .Mac, which is Apple's version of Passport/MSN It's another $100/yr.
It's email, some online training videos, and web space (not much) and file storage (not much and it's cut in half with email storage).
I dunno. It's useful for some people not others, so you gotta call that one yourself. I don't always recommend that one.
[edit]
David Pogue's chapter on how to move your files from your PC to Mac when switching platforms is in his book on switching in general.
You asked what you're missing -- that depends on what you're looking for. Hehe. No really. Both OS's have stolen some great features from each other. The Mac FINALLY has an alt-tab, a right-click, and a Task Manager equivalent. There's also a "dock" at the bottom of the screen that's like an overblown Quick Launch of the Windows Taskbar. Networking while roaming with a laptop is just wonderfully easier on the Mac for like a gazillion reasons, such as it automatically finds its settings and other devices better. Printing using Apple's Bonjour is so good that I just load it onto every Windows machine I have and don't bother with MS's junk. On the other hand, there's no MS Remote Desktop equivalent, so if you use that you're SOL unless you don't mind the horrible speed hit of VNC. Apple has a big package named Remote Desktop Administrator that's like $300 but it's made for multi-computer remote tech support, not for using another of your machines within your house and it sure ain't cheap.
THERE'S NO GPS NAV SOFTWARE FOR THE MAC. So if you want that you'll have to go with BootCamp (beta of running Windows natively on a Mac). I run Alk's CoPilot Live on my MacBook Pro under Windows and it works great but Windows on the Mac really is beta at this point.
(I hope you're getting the impression that switching isn't going to be a big deal.)
Most keyboard commands on the Mac are more direct, meaning they don't take 2 stages (alt-F, X is only command-Q) and you're rarely nagged with an "are you sure?" dialog when it won't cause a problem, so that'll be a relief.
On the Mac you totally lose some nice maintenance things like disk defragmentation from the GUI, but memory management and many other things is automatic.
The Mac's Software Update is beginning to require multiple reboots. That's getting just like Windows and just as annoying. When you 1st get your Mac you'll be swearing at the 150+ MB of updates and 2 reboots you'll need to download and do.
The Mac OS used to be stable enough. Now Apple seems to be writing Safari and other things with some pretty low-level API's that can totally freeze the system. That's a frustrating trend. You used to be able to almost always force-quit out of anything. Now it's more like "most of the time". It's not frequent, just that when it does happen it has gotten to be more of a system-wide freeze than pre-10.4.x days.
LOTS of cool things you can do on the Mac for free. Preview is nearly like Adobe Acrobat Pro. You can append pdf's, annotate. The Mac natively prints to pdf from everything, so that's a given.
You get Automator (a graphical scripting tool), AppleScript (a scripting language not as easy as MS's Visual Basic but intuitive once you get the hang of it), Spotlight (Apple's Google Desktop and nearly as fast), iChat with a built-in video camera (there's a good reason to get .Mac or AOL) and the easiest network printer setup you've ever experienced -- Bonjour printing.
You won't need to run VLC to get a DVD to work. They actually work on the Mac.
CD/DVD burning works incredibly well, but it's pretty good on the PC these days too.
Laptop battery life on the Mac is about 1/2 of that of a Dell Inspiron -- about 2 hrs absolute max, so that totally sucks.
You won't need to buy as much shareware or download freeware on the Mac as you're probably used to for the PC to get things working. That's one of the "it just works" things. (Like the VLC video issue, or WinZip, or Acrobat, or Roxio, or ...)
No TiVo Desktop for the Mac, last I checked.
No real QuickBooks for the Mac, regardless of what Intuit says (you lose data if you use certain features and then round-trip your file to your accountant at the end of the year - see p. 313 of the QuickBooks Pro manual for the Mac)
No APC PowerChute for the Mac so on some UPS's you can't give the thing a name & IP address. [edit] There
is a
PowerChute Personal for the Mac but the Mac isn't supported on some of the other tools, such as PowerChute Business version or if you were to get the BH500NET you can't set its IP address or give it a name because it comes with a Win-only app that uses custom device discovery/config.