from IBM to Mac?

keithhr

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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.
I'm thinking of getting a new computer but am afraid that none of my pc based printers, cable modems, etc will work with a mac. In 1992 I briefly owned a small mac but it would only work with mac based products. Is that still the case, what would I have to do to switch over?
I am not really happy with xp windows, am tired of supporting and using microsoft, and hope to hear from a few mac users out there. Every year they have the big mac exposition at the Moscone center here in San Francisco and have huge throngs of mac fanatics, what am i missing?
 

ABTOMAT

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Strictly talking about hardware and peripherals, most decent USB printers/scanners/whatevers made in the last 5-7 years will work with newer Macs. It totally depends on your particular models. Look up what they support. As far as cable modems, anything Ethernet based will work on a Mac unless it requires special software.

Other than software there's hardly any difference now betwen Macs and PCs. The recent change to x86 systems have made them nearly identical.
 

Sturluson

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I have both, and vastly prefer the Mac. It is intuitive and logical. Turning on the PC (which is only three months old, by the way) is like entering a dangerous jungle - you never know what's going to bite you. The PC is loaded with security software (McAfee) which is itself a pain the butt.

As far as peripherals go, I agree that most everything that's come out recently will work with both. I suggest you go to an Apple Store in the bay area and ask one of the folks there; they're very helpful, I've found.

I have to tell you that I'm not a computer genius, and don't want to be. They're simply something I have to use. I would rather read a book. But using the Mac is no stress, requires no great technical knowledge on my part and does the jobs I ask of it. I'm sure there are PC experts here who possess many multiples of my computer know-how, and can make their PC's sing, but for me, Mac is the way to go.
 

AJ_Dual

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Sturluson said:
I have both, and vastly prefer the Mac. It is intuitive and logical. Turning on the PC (which is only three months old, by the way) is like entering a dangerous jungle - you never know what's going to bite you. The PC is loaded with security software (McAfee) which is itself a pain the butt.

It's a funny catch-22 "Mac People" are in. PC's need all that extra third-party security because they're so popular. Since they're the majority, they're the target for all the attacks. True, the Unix-based OSX is "tighter" than Windows in some ways, but it dosen't have the huge pool of hackers around the globe trying to exploit it, like some merciless virtual neural network, or evil distributed parallel computing project...

Then, if you factored in business practices, Apple would look a lot more like Microsoft in terms of it's strategy if they were to suddenly switch market shares. "Think Different" would become a facade quite quickly.

So despite the evangelisim on the part of Apple owners, it's really in thier best interests that Apple never get "too popular", because it will surely become what they hate in the process.
 

Sturluson

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AJ, I agree with you completely. Apple would be a different beast if it were more popular. But the Windows system is so cumbersome and heavily-laden (55 zillion lines of code?) that I'm glad there's the alternative.

In a year or so, I intend to buy an Intel-based Mac that can run both Mac OSX and Vista - if Vista is out by then. Then I'll have what I like together with what I sometimes need...
 

Mednanu

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AJ_Dual said:
True, the Unix-based OSX is "tighter" than Windows in some ways, but it dosen't have the huge pool of hackers around the globe trying to exploit it, like some merciless virtual neural network, or evil distributed parallel computing project...


Ummm, UNIX has been around a lot longer than the Mac or Windows. UNIX has had more exposure to 'hackers' than any OS out there. The reason it ( and others like the old non-UNIX Mac OS and the newer, UNIX-like-Mac OS, BeOS, etc, etc ) doesn't have a problem with virii, trojans, or other malware is because they are coded significantly better and more responsibly from a security perspective. Period.

I work as a systems admin and see the full gamut of how these OS'es handle themselves. Out of all of our systems, Windows is the only one that has to be incessantly patched and coddled just to try and keep it from getting almost instantly infected ( and then STILL cannot be secured, even by Microsoft's own admission ). It's sad, but true.

They play games great though - I'll give ya that one as a consolation prize at least. :p
 
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James S

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all philosophy aside, if you're thinking of making the switch you already have your reasons ;) we have discussed the philosophy or the relative merits of the 2 platforms at long length here. This is a specific question about some hardware compatibility. Everybody that has read those threads knows where I stand on the issue ;)

Apple has always had good printer support, even in the dark ages of the early 90's. HP makes decent drivers for their printers on the mac. Just go to HP's support site and look up your particular model of multi-device and make sure there are mac drivers listed for it. You may not even need this as the default install for OSX contains literally hundreds of printer drivers.

Cable modems or DSL or whatever need to be the ethernet versions to work, there may be some USB drivers out there, but you wouldn't want to use them if you had a choice.
 
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binky

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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.
 
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carrot

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The salespeople pushed .Mac to me, and so I decided I'd give it a shot. If you have multiple Macs, it is very convenient. In quite a few applications I've found neat settings that let you sync all your Mac's settings and data seamlessly, and the iDisk storage is nice. Not to mention Apple offers its members a few freebies now and then (usually Apple loops for GB and Logic). On the other hand, if you don't need *another* email account, networked storage space (which is accessible on Windows too), or a way to sync multiple Macs, it's not really worth it. I'm not renewing it.

I have switched from Windows to Linux to OSX. I like OSX because it lets me use the same *nix commands I'm familiar with (convenient!) and it tends to Just Work™ as many Mac users seem to be in the habit of saying. Not to say I haven't had more than my fair share of AppleCare warranty repair QC issues, but in general I have been pretty pleased with the operating system itself. There are some apps that are so well designed on OSX you start to miss them when you use Windows, like Mail.app which is very streamlined. And MS Office:Mac is a heck of a lot better designed than Office 2K3 for Windows. The consistency of UI throughout applications is the real draw of OSX for me, and *nix compatibility. The added security it has over Windows XP is just icing on the cake. If not for the consistency, I'd probably have picked up a Thinkpad instead of a Powerbook.

However, administrating OSX machines... now that's a pain.

As for whether switching to Mac is for you, it depends on what you need to be compatible with, and what you need to run. For the most part, it's easy and seamless. If you get one of the new Intel Macs, you can boot into Windows as a last resort for compatibility.
 

yellow1

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fyi, if you end up purchasing a mac... they have an excellent educational discount. that is, if you happen to be a college student. or teacher.

apple has recently re-announced support for the ipod rebate program as well... buy a selected mac, plus an ipod... and get a 179 rebate

you can ask at your local apple store, or check online... to see if you qualify.

i don't work for them. i just read too much.
 

Mike Painter

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MaximumPC this month has an interesting article on the new Intel based Mac's. With XP thy run apps faster and in some cases *much* faster than the Mac version of the program under MAc OS.
As for security, if you search around a bit you will find that in recent months Mac has released a lot of patches, in some cases more than XP has.

In the early days when Macintosh was the new kid on the block, the hackers ignored the boring business machines with DOS. Working in a computer store near a college campus found us constantly reformatting Macs because of what the students brought in on a floppy.

As for "intuitive", nothing is. Some people find the MAc way easier, some the Windows way. I never liked the finder even after I found it and the task bar always made more sense.
I also have always liked a separate menu for each window and felt that people were smart enough to use two buttons.

Apple has always said they were a hardware company, although using software where others used hardware is what made them a ton of money. If this is the case, then switching from thier OS to a 'nix based one with a pretty front end and then to an Intel platform may indicate that the next step will be a Mac face on Windows.

Finally, part of the reliability of the Mac OS was based on a captive audience. Now that a huge number of combinations of pieces and parts are possible I suspect the conflicks will start to show more often.
 

drizzle

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keithhr,

I hope you will update this thread with your experience after you switch. I have been thinking more and more of switching for most of the reasons mentioned above. But I have some of the reservations about the "Mac way" that Mike Painter mentioned. I'm an old dog that would have to learn new tricks.

Still, it has got to be better than linux, I think. I have used linux a fair amount and although it's getting better all the time I think I would like the idea of the nice consistent front end on top of a Unix base that a Mac would give me.
 

dca2

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Mac user since 1985. Forced PC user since 2003 (they stuck one in my classroom.) I am slightly biased towards the Mac.

As far as printers go, I have only run across one printer I could not use. It is an older HP laser that is at my NG Armory. I am using an iBook G4 with OS 10.4.6. I literally have used dozens of printers from most manufacturers with ease. Plug in the printer via USB, tell machine to print, search for new printers, select the one you are hooked up to and it works. I have also had great success printing over wireless network to both Macs and PC's in my school building(network running on Windows server)

The Apple website is a wealth of info and is usually up to date on compatable devices http://guide.apple.com/uscategories/hwprinting.lasso
 

Mike Painter

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drizzle said:
keithhr,

Still, it has got to be better than linux, I think. I have used linux a fair amount and although it's getting better all the time I think I would like the idea of the nice consistent front end on top of a Unix base that a Mac would give me.

Bare bones Linux and Unix have always reminded me of CP/M on steriods.
 

keithhr

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wow, what an amazing amount of inciteful information, more than I could have possibly hoped for, now to actually print this thread so I can re-read it at my leisure. It seems like Mac wouldn't present nearly as many problems as I originally suspected. HP does in fact make drivers for macs and people have been able to sync their axims as well.
Now this leads me to maybe go one step further and take a look at Linux operating systems, which I've been doing this evening. So , what set me off today on my anti microsoft crusade, it must have been the several hours I spent screwing around tryinig to install an upgrade to Kaspersky Labs anti virus software. I also use LavaSoft, and SpySweeper, throw in spyBot, with a bit of avg Avast software and I am fed up with this whole process
 

drizzle

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keithhr said:
wow, what an amazing amount of inciteful information...
:lolsign: keithhr, I hope you will forgive me for poking fun at your spelling but this cracked me up. This thread could easily have been inciteful. Thankfully it was insightful. :)
 

Mednanu

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keithhr said:
...Now this leads me to maybe go one step further and take a look at Linux operating systems...

Yellow Dog is a very nice implementation of Linux for Apple based architechtures, although I don't know if they have a version that runs on the new Intel-chipped Macs just yet.
 

senecaripple

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i've always been a mac addict, but since jobs sold out on intel, i may look into an hp amd with vista, or i'll wait till the next mac os 5 where you can have it both ways by rebooting without installing bootcamp yourself!. when my ibook g3 dies!
 

James S

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senecaripple said:
i've always been a mac addict, but since jobs sold out on intel, i may look into an hp amd with vista, or i'll wait till the next mac os 5 where you can have it both ways by rebooting without installing bootcamp yourself!. when my ibook g3 dies!


How does what processor is in the device have any impact on your choice of operating systems? We weren't running a Mac because of how fantastic IBM and Motorola's chip was, we are running it cause of the OS. The PPC chip lost it's edge in processor speed several years ago. Switching to an Intel or AMD chip is a good thing for the mac and doesn't affect the OS usability or security or anything else at all.

There are several possibilities in the pipeline for running windows on these modern macs if you want to. Bootcamp of course, to boot back and forth, the kernel is built around the idea that several OS's could be hosted at once so it's quite possible that we'll have a virtual windows we can run in the future. And there are also programs now (mainly IE7 at the moment) that you can get compiled for OSX against macos ports of the WINE libraries. But that is still REALLY buggy at the moment, more of a proof of concept than a usable product.
 

Mike Painter

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James S said:
How does what processor is in the device have any impact on your choice of operating systems? We weren't running a Mac because of how fantastic IBM and Motorola's chip was, we are running it cause of the OS. The PPC chip lost it's edge in processor speed several years ago. Switching to an Intel or AMD chip is a good thing for the mac and doesn't affect the OS usability or security or anything else at all.

The usability of the OS may not be affected but the apps that run on them and the security have and will be significently affected and most people buy a computer to run programs. MAximumPC reported on the huge difference in speed between running XP and the App on the new Macs vs running them under the Mac OS. The Mac OS lost by a considerable margin in many cases. Most of the problems are because those apps have not yet been optimized and that will take time, if it gets done at all.
As for security, most of todays hackers cut their teeth on Intel systems. I suspect Mac, which has been releasing about the same number of patches as XP has the last few months might be attracting their attention.
 
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