What made you switch?

Joined
Dec 26, 2008
Messages
225
Reaction score
5
Points
18
Location
London, UK
Your Mac's Specs
 13" MacBook Air w/ 1.8GHz i7 & 4GB, iPhone 5S 32GB Gold
Ok, so I've seen a "How long have you been a switcher for" thread, but not "What made you switch", so here it is; What made you decide to switch to OS X?

Two things made me decide to switch:

1.) The general ease of use won me over when I first used one, and then I started playing with them in the Apple Store over the course of a couple of months, trying new things each time to see how much easier and quicker they were to do on a Mac as opposed to on Windows.
2.) We have a few old eMacs at school and I had to use one once because all the other PCs were taken up, and I was surprised at how much faster this 700Mhz Mac with 256mb of Ram was than our 2.2Ghz dual-core Athlon, 2GB Win XP machines while being so much easier to use.

So what about you?
 
Joined
Jul 9, 2009
Messages
356
Reaction score
3
Points
18
Location
Colorado
Pretty much, I'd had enough of Windows. I've got a 4 year old Dell XP notebook that has worked well enough but that I didn't expect to go on forever. I felt it would be smart to get a replacement before the Dell failed. With the debacle that was Vista I didn't want to risk Win 7 so I started giving the Mac serious consideration. I've had the MBP about 1 month now, may be one of my smarter moves in a long time.
 
Joined
Jul 14, 2008
Messages
675
Reaction score
22
Points
18
Location
Scotland, UK
Your Mac's Specs
nMP 6-core/32Gb/D700/512Gb: rMBP 15" 2.3GHz/16Gb/512Gb: iPhone 6 128Gb: iPad Air 2 128Gb: NEC PA322U
Well, I used old iMacs (the rainbow type ones) in school and hated them.

I always talked Macs down and was your typical Wintel fanboy.

Until...The PowerMac G5 came out in 2003. I then adored Mac's, the industrial look, the power and later when it came with water-cooling I always dreamed of switching.

Unfortunately, being in high-school with just a paper round I couldn't afford one - even as a x-mas present it was a bit much considering I had a high-spec PC.

Last year tho, with money to burn I figured I'd take the plunge and bought my dream machine from 2004 - water cooled G5 with dual 2.7GHz chips. The fact that it was 4 yrs old didn't bother me - I finally had a PM G5! :)

I loved OS X, clean internals of the case, industrial design.

Then spending time on the Apple Store brought me to were I am now - Mac heaven!

Can't say I hate Microsoft Windows, but given the choice I'd run OS X.

So I suppose, the G5 made me switch - thank you Jonathan Ive... :)
 
Joined
Mar 24, 2008
Messages
480
Reaction score
21
Points
18
1.) The general ease of use won me over when I first used one, and then I started playing with them in the Apple Store over the course of a couple of months, trying new things each time to see how much easier and quicker they were to do on a Mac as opposed to on Windows.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm curious as to the types of tasks you performed in the Apple Store, on machines specifically intended to be shown to potential customers, over a "on Windows" machine of unknown specs in an unknown place.

2.) We have a few old eMacs at school and I had to use one once because all the other PCs were taken up, and I was surprised at how much faster this 700Mhz Mac with 256mb of Ram was than our 2.2Ghz dual-core Athlon, 2GB Win XP machines while being so much easier to use.
I'm curious about some of the specifics with this as well. Can you discuss the types of tasks you were performing on the two machines, and how you felt the "faster" and in what cases.
 
Joined
Feb 23, 2009
Messages
1,346
Reaction score
50
Points
48
Your Mac's Specs
21" iMac * 2.8 Ghz Intel Core i7 * 16GB 1333 Mhz DDR3 * 1TB HD *AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB
I actually didn't have too many problems with Windows over the years, and I really only got a Mac so that I could get certified in Final Cut Pro and get back into editing. But once I got my MBP, it just blew me away, from the look of it to its ease of maintenance to the compatibilities between its amazing apps. It was like having a trusty old car with crank windows and then driving a car with power everything and an onboard computer.
 
Joined
May 15, 2009
Messages
1,096
Reaction score
8
Points
38
Your Mac's Specs
White MacBook. iLife '09. iWork '09. Mac OS X 10.6
As many of you may know, my dad hates Windows, so instead he's still content to use IBM OS/2. But, all in all it has plenty of problems and an interface that (in my opinion) looks like the stone age. Then I went into fourth grade and saw a mac with OS 9. It was a whole new world! Multimedia was simple, no computer freezes, nothing! Just turn it on and it runs!
 
Joined
Aug 25, 2009
Messages
21
Reaction score
0
Points
1
For me, initially curiosity...
Curiosity had me looking at Mac's last year.
But with uni starting in a week, i needed some thing powerful, and portable.

I had tired of windows XP/Vista, and had beta tested the windows 7, and wasn't impressed.

The Mac, a MBP 17" was a logical choice, one i enjoy using for my day to day tasks.
 
Joined
Nov 11, 2008
Messages
177
Reaction score
0
Points
16
Your Mac's Specs
15" alluminum MacBook Pro 2.53
Blame it on the iPhone!
 
M

MacInWin

Guest
The decider for me was seeing WinXPPro running on an iMac in the store and realizing it ran faster on the iMac than it did in my quad-core Dell Inspiron! The difference was that on the iMac, they had no virus protection, just the operating system, which is pretty quick. My setup is that I run most stuff in OSX, but when I absolutely have to shift to WinXP, it's a virtual image in VMWare that I have carefully backed up. If it gets hit with viri, I can just whack it and restore the clean backup. I thought I'd spend more time in XP, but over the year I've had the iMac, I've only rarely been forced back to the XP by some unique need.
 
Joined
Jun 14, 2009
Messages
41
Reaction score
0
Points
6
Location
San Antonio
Your Mac's Specs
MBP 15", 2.6, i7, 8G Ram, OS X 10.10, iPhone 6 Plus
The poor excuse of a OS called Vista, The iPhone and the knowing that I can make an appointment with a Genius and have a problem resolved, not that I expect any with SL. Pretty much sums it up.
 
Joined
May 19, 2009
Messages
8,428
Reaction score
295
Points
83
Location
Waiting for a mate . . .
Your Mac's Specs
21" iMac 2.9Ghz 16GB RAM - 10.11.3, iPhone6s & iPad Air 2 - iOS 9.2.1, ATV 4Th Gen tvOS, ATV3
For me, initially curiosity...
Curiosity had me looking at Mac's last year.
But with uni starting in a week, i needed some thing powerful, and portable.

I had tired of windows XP/Vista, and had beta tested the windows 7, and wasn't impressed.

The Mac, a MBP 17" was a logical choice, one i enjoy using for my day to day tasks.

Same here VIPeR .... curiosity got the better of me overtime.
Having used MS for years to be honest i really couldn't come to grasps with that OS. The having to do scans all the time and the constant freezing of the PC.
A friend had one and over time watching her use a Mac i was impressed to see what a beautiful interface it had and how logical it seemed to use.
Then the final straw was the chance to snap up a late 2008 white McBoook for nearly $600 dollars off the advertised price... And yes its legit from a store and not off the back of a truck :)
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2009
Messages
156
Reaction score
12
Points
18
Location
Anchorage, AK
Your Mac's Specs
15" MacBook Pro (Late-2011), 2.4 GHz Core i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD
After dealing with Vista and it's quirks, I first started out with using a "hackintosh" - primarily to refamiliarize myself with the Mac, since the last time I used a Mac regularly was back in the days of OS 8.1. What I quickly discovered was that in order to really enjoy the full Mac experience, I needed to run it on genuine Apple hardware. As soon as I booted my new MacBook Pro for the first time, I knew that the Mac was far and away a superior machone for my purposes.

I do have Boot Camp and Windows 7 set up for when I have to use Windows, but I find myself dropping into it less often all the time.
 
Joined
Sep 7, 2009
Messages
41
Reaction score
1
Points
8
I've been working on Windows or Microsoft OS powered PCs since well, I knew what a PC was. We had the Apple IIe's in school, but to me they were big heavy slow pieces of crap compared to what a PC was.

To me PCs were IT. My dad used them, so did my mum (finance and engineering parents) as a PC was really the only thing the industry used and would run applications made for the MS OS.

I got into PCs and built them, became a PC tech in secondary school, and later a network admin. Learned Linux, and just about every version of Windows available, and would talk down about everything Mac as it to me then was an inferior slow pile of over expensive crap. After knowing how PCs failed all the time, I just kind of accepted the fact that having Windows run your computer you were just going to have to deal with it. Kind of like a car dying for no reason when you push the throttle down a bit harder than usual, or making it climb a hill.

I met a quite a few people over time that were really into Mac, but my stereotype of them were just overly rich snobbs that well, I really can't give you a great one. Just some negative thing my mind made up because it didn't like the Computer so naturally I couldn't like the people who used them. Called them Macintrash and every other derogatory name you can think of.

A few years later I talked to people about MacOS PCs (they are personal computers after all) and they couldn't say enough cool things about them. Being a bit older, more mature, and open-minded I thought, well let's give it a go sometime. I walked into an Apple store and decided to play around wth one. Holy **** they were cool. Expensive, but very cool. The capabilities they had were just amasing. The things they did out of the box were theoretically possible with a Windows PC, but would take weeks of configuration and possibly programming. Then a couple employees at the Apple store told me that unlike Windows PCs, MacOS just worked. Everything was ready to go out of the box. You don't have 20 programmes that are trialware and will expire unless you pay even more money. Making a very long (so far story short) I was now envious of MacOS and wanted one, but didn't have the money.

Yesterday I met a bloke at a car show near me who drove a Ford and couldn't tell me enough good things about the company (he does a LOT of research on the brand, so much so that I thought he worked for ford). Then I said something about I'd like to get into MacOS but really can't afford an $800 computer right now. That's when he told me he was selling his 6yr. old PowerMac G4 (didn't have a clue what that was) for $150 for the screen, keyboard, mouse, well everything really.

I went over to his flat, looked at it. Saw how absolutely mind-blowingly simple it was to connect another screen and have dual monitors. He then said, Apple designs their products to work. If you connect another monitor to your Windows PC it gets confused as to what you want it to do. MacOS thinks that if you connect another one to your PC, you obviously want to use it, so it turns it on and does what you think it should do.

It's turning out to be a bit of a learning curve so far. There are some really simple things that I have no idea how to do, but I'm learning everyday.


So right now, mine is:
1.25ghz dual core
512mb ram (upgrading very soon)
like $80gb HD (going to 500gb soon)
stock video card
and MacOS 10.2.8 (upgrading to 10.4 asap)


Sad thing is about that setup. My Windows PC is:
Pentium 3ghz
4gb ram
500gb hd (yes ripping it out to go into the mac)
stupid realtek sound card
GForce something video card
Windows XP Pro

And it's still slower than the MacOS PC that is running less than half the hardware. I also needed something faster to run Ableton Live 7 on because the realtek sound chip is absolute rubbish (HD my ***) and even recording audio would cause the sound to skip horribly.
 
OP
DriftNismo
Joined
Dec 26, 2008
Messages
225
Reaction score
5
Points
18
Location
London, UK
Your Mac's Specs
 13" MacBook Air w/ 1.8GHz i7 & 4GB, iPhone 5S 32GB Gold
Can you elaborate on this? I'm curious as to the types of tasks you performed in the Apple Store, on machines specifically intended to be shown to potential customers, over a "on Windows" machine of unknown specs in an unknown place.

In the Apple Store, they were mainly photo work; Photo management, certain photoshop work as well as video editing on Final Cut on my friend's 2.26Ghz iMac. Other than that, they were mainly simple tasks, yet they still seemed faster on the Macs; Browsing around files, using word processing programs, setting calendar appointments, sending an e-mail off with attachments, etc.

Where on Windows this simple applications as well as the more advanced ones seemed to freeze up momentarily a lot more and generally take longer to load, especially with photo management.

To keep it fair all these tasks were carried out on a 20"/24" 2.4GHz iMac w/ 2GB RAM and an ATi HD2600 Pro, compared to a Sun W2100z 2.39Ghz dual AMD Opterons, 16GB DDR2 and an X1950 running Vista Ultimate x64.

I'm curious about some of the specifics with this as well. Can you discuss the types of tasks you were performing on the two machines, and how you felt the "faster" and in what cases.

Again, this was mainly photoshop and photo management work, as well as word processing and Google Sketchup. Photoshop was definitely quicker on the eMac, mainly because of it locking up so much on the Windows machine. Word processing wasn't that much quicker, but again, it locked up a lot more (momentarily, but still annoying) on the Windows machines we have. Sketchup was a little slower to be honest on the eMac, but again, it locked up a whole lot on the Windows machines.

For specs, see first post.
 
Joined
Apr 23, 2009
Messages
191
Reaction score
5
Points
18
Location
Sheffield, England
Your Mac's Specs
Model Identifier: iMac9,1 Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Well, the first Apple I used was, I think, one of the Apple IIe's we equipped our first teaching lab with. Then the university more or less standardised on the IPM PC, so it was goodbye to the Apple.

Years with the PC followed until I finally got fed up with all the stuff that comes down the line - viruses, trojans, etc., etc., plus update messages seemingly every day - it just felt all too yech! Plus the tedium of downloading and installing software, which seems to take more trouble than it often turns out to be worth.

So I switched and now use a 24" iMac, which performs beautifully - I expected to have trouble with getting into my wireless network but the machine detected the network, said, "Give me the WEP code" and that was that! I stuck on an external hard drive and it said, "Do you want to use this for backup?" and that was that - brilliant.

I have Windows XP running under VMFusion for legacy software I don't want to spend money on replacing (e.g., Photoshop), or where no good Mac alternative exists (why is there nothing for the Mac like Homesite for the PC in html editors, or like DVD Shrink?) and I've ditched the keyboard and the mouse - dreadful crap - they look pretty but are ergonomically awful - and use a Msoft ergonomic keyboard and a Logitech wireless mouse.

But the Mac itself is here to stay!
 
Joined
Mar 24, 2008
Messages
480
Reaction score
21
Points
18
In the Apple Store, they were mainly photo work; Photo management....

These are interesting points. This isn't the thread for debating these sorts of things, and this forum in general tends to frown on anyone that wants to debate, so I'll just say I find your observations fascinating.
 
Joined
Jul 2, 2009
Messages
58
Reaction score
1
Points
8
Location
San Diego, CA.
Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro 15", 2.8Ghz, 4GB RAM, 500GB/ 60GB 5G iPod/ 160GB 6G iPod/ 8GB Nano/ 32GB 2nd Gen iTouch
"I had an HP DV9700 worked on Monday 8 June 2009. Tuesday 9 June 2009 my laptop wouldn't even start. No BIOS, nothing on the screen, no nothing except the lights for the dvd controls were on. Took my laptop to my local computer shop and they told me about the Limited Warranty whatever-it-is. Stoked, I immediately went home, got on HP website and found out that my DV9700 WASN'T EVEN COVERED!!! Even though I experienced the same problems as the other models. I called the number and talked to "someone" I couldn't even pronounce the name (yes, it was somewhere in India). Whereby, she kept repeating over and over that the Limited-blah-blah-blah didn't cover my HP. Then, I kept telling her over and over that since it was a "DV9000" model series it should be covered. I then asked to talk to a supervisor. She put me on hold for a total of 45 mins!!! Then, she hung up on me!!!! I decided to google a local shop here. Spent 25 min on the freeway, got to the shop where they did a diagnostic and told me my motherboard crapped out. They also told me that HP has had soooo many problems with this type of laptop. THEN, they said it would cost me.....wait for it.....$800!!!!! To fix!!!!!!. So, you can see my dilemma. I'm mad at HP for not honoring a "recall model" and for not helping their customer and the shop who was going to charge me $800. I'm done with HP."

I posted this on an "I-hate-HP"-type forum. Done with anything PC. Mac is the way for me. They may be on the pricey side but that's what you pay for. A great product. Outstanding customer service. It's like buying the Ferrari of computers to me.
 
Joined
Sep 5, 2009
Messages
136
Reaction score
0
Points
16
Location
Dover
Your Mac's Specs
2012 Mac Mini
I am actually switching for my wife. Her computer is aging and she likes to install stupid things like weatherbug etc. and gets adware and spyware on her system so I am thinking about getting her a used iMac for Christmas. I think she is really going to love it as it will do everything she needs a computer for.
 
Joined
Jul 27, 2006
Messages
394
Reaction score
23
Points
18
Location
Berkshire, Uk
Your Mac's Specs
15.4" MBP Sep 09, 2.66Ghz C2D, 4Gb Ram, 320Gb HDD 7200rpm, 10.6.x / iPod Touch 8Gb
Cant remember why, it just makes sense now.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top