Switchers, what do you love most about your new Mac?

Where to start....... F9, Pages2, iDisk,Built in iSight, and the fact that iMac is now Skype video compatible, Dashboard and widgets, iPhoto, Keyword sorting in iPhoto .My Bluetooth Mighty mouse and keyboard. and the fact that I had no trouble migrating my stuff I even share a router with 2 PC's...it just works..:mac: :mac:


Oh! yes the real big one the "@"key which you don't have to use alt.gr.+ 2 to type

I switched about five months ago, and the list of things I LOVE about my Mac is huge!

1/ As everyone has noted, the stability and "just works" nature of OS X is fabulous!

2/ No virus', trojans, serious attacks from the dangerous world of the net

3/ Widgets! FABULOUS!

4/ The fact that you can close an application window and still have the application loaded and waiting. Subsequent uses of the application just "snap" into being . I LOVE the responsiveness

5/ The Spotlight integration into the File Save and Save As dialogs. You can save a file anywhere on your system with only a few keystrokes instead of all that tedious navigation through the file system that Windows would impose on you.

6/ Open Source and Unix! Mac OS X is built on a FreeBSD base, and thus supports a huge array of Open Source Software, via the DarwinPorts or Fink bases. I switched from a combination of Windows and Linux to Mac OS X. I now have the best of all worlds, having installed all my old Linux favorites via DarwinPorts, plus all the Mac OS X stuff.

7/ Encrypted virtual volumes - it is DEAD EASY to set up an encrypted virtual volume (a .dmg file) in which to keep your sensitive records - financials, wills, etc. It costs big money to get a program to allow you to do this in the Windows world.

8/ Included Software - iLife is wonderful, even the basic image viewer, Preview, is rich and feature packed. No such stuff on Windows!

9/ Spring loaded folders - what a GREAT idea and so easy to work with. I have to work with Windows at work and I really miss these there.

10/ The little dot that shows up in the red close button on each window, letting you know that there are unsaved changes. Its a little thing, but really, really nice.

11/ Installing apps. Apps are basically self contained packages on Mac OS X. Installing is dirt easy - just drag to the Applications folder, and applications don't strew hundreds of little DLL and other support files all over your disk. Much, much more sensible!

12/ The integration between Safari and Mail. I LOVE the ability to email and entire web page (not a link, but a copy of the full content) with a single command. Did you know about this - go to a page you like, and type CMD-I. Boom! Mail opens up and presents you with a message ready to be mailed, whose content is the page you were just looking at. This is GREAT for mailing travel itineraries, or even just a story you saw on a web page that you want to share.

The list goes on and on, but I will stop here. Apple and Mac OS X are fabulous. Windows... well, Vista better be really good if it wants to keep up, and I doubt it will; Leopard will up the ante so much that the team in Redmond will be almost instantly behind the eight ball again.

Rock on Apple!

the rock solid reliablitity and the compatibility between applications, it seems every program can export to another.

mac57 said:

7/ Encrypted virtual volumes - it is DEAD EASY to set up an encrypted virtual volume (a .dmg file) in which to keep your sensitive records - financials, wills, etc. It costs big money to get a program to allow you to do this in the Windows world.

10/ The little dot that shows up in the red close button on each window, letting you know that there are unsaved changes. Its a little thing, but really, really nice.

Click to expand...

Not done 7/ yet but sounds ineteresting . . .

I noticed 10/ last night when in PS. What a simple yet effective feature! Excellent!

After a day of owning, and about 10-15 hours of use at school...
-Everything seems to work right away, right out of the box (Except for connecting to my school's wireless right away, but that's because you need to log in first. School's fault, not the Mac's.)
-Pre-installed mail clients, widgets, media manegement
-Nice system preferences
-Expose
-The Terminal (I'm a big *nix fan, though I hate Aix). Allows me to do ssh work and such without installing anything extra
-Drag & Drop install, and all programs being in one place
-Icons on the desktop starting on the left, not the right like in Windows & Linux (I like having the focus of my wallpapers on the left)
-Widgets
-Stuffit being pre-installed (Yes, I know a lot of you find it isn;t, but it was for me.)

Problems:
-Front Row seems to run a bit slow when trying to find things
-Stalled a bit every now and then before I updated to 10.4.8 (Came with 10.4.7) and updated firmware.
-I still have no idea what the end/home keys do!

And I do have some third-party software installed already: FireFox (I like my FoxMarks auto-backup system), aMSN, Blender, and a trial version of Aperture.

Fast start-up, even though I never turn it off (which I love as well)
As another Norwegian said, the @-key.

Easy answer for me. In five months with the iMac I've had zero maintenance issues -- as in ZERO! Interestingly, one of my purchase "hot-buttons" was ability to run Windows if I wanted to. Forget it. Never want to see Windows again. Never going back. (Good luck with Vista -- the registry remains) I like just learning the software and doing my stuff while the machine just sits there -- bless its little electronic heart. If my PC's hadn't constantly antagonized me, I'd have a different opinion -- but they did. Always. Continually. On-going. My iMac doesn't.

Too Many!

-F9
-dashboard
-the thingy on the bottom w/all my fav. apps (Can u tell I'm new to mac?)
-the glowing apple on the top case
-EASY TO USE! although I have used mac help a few times
-iLife!
-Don't have to worry much about viruses and all that nasty stuff. Although I've always been sorta careful about what I download
-the OS looks aesthetically(sp?) better than Windows

Ok I just love the whole package!!

So, I switched from a PC to a MacBook Pro on 10/31, then switched my spouse's computer (Dell notebok to a MacBook) on 11/11. Soon we're going to add a Mini for a file server/media storehouse. I'm pretty enthused (even if my checkbook isn't crazy about it).

I think the feeling I like the most is that when I set down to work or relax with the computer, I don't really worry if everything is going to work. I don't have the subconscious anxiety of questions like, "Did my network connection hiccup? Is the antivirus compromising all the CPU cycles? Did Windows update (and what did it screw up)?" Now, I just boot up and get to work (or play).

And when an app crashes in OS X (and yes, they do from time to time), it doesn't drag the rest of my session down in flames with it. I just relaunch the app and get on with it.

These machines ain't perfect, no matter what the platform or OS. And there are some lemons out there for sure. But I feel much more at home now. And it's nice to feel like you're part of an exclusive bunch. Boot up a Mac at Starbucks and folks just stare sometimes.

Right now, I'm into digging up new apps and widgets (especially free stuff). And finding out about alternative apps to accomplish tasks in new ways than what I was doing on the PC. My favorite apps right now are Unison (a Usenet client), Comic Book Lover, NetNewsWire, Gawker and iShowU. And it helped that World of Warcraft runs on the Mac, to speed my switch along.

xtophercaa said:

Boot up a Mac at Starbucks and folks just stare sometimes.

Click to expand...

sure they're not staring at the quad venti breve mocha? <grin>
btw, excelent post, lots of good points about piece of mind.
also love unison (and panic's other awesome app - audion)

I LOVE OSX. So beautiful and seamless and doesn't crash, which blows my mind since i'm so used to XP constantly going up in flames.

I love the sleep mode. I never felt comfortable putting my desktop to sleep because i heard doing so could cause the ram to overheat. With my macbook pro i just put it to rest, without having to restart. Restarting my pc was a constant annoyance.

I love the lack of viruses!

I love how easily customizable everything is. Previously, in order to get custom window backgrounds i had to practically hack windows. I also wanted to make my thumbnails bigger - another windows hack that makes XP vulnerable, and thus ruined my machine requiring a format once again.

I love the screen, the colors are so much more vibrant than what i'm used to on a monitor.

I love the object dock. In XP i made my own tool bars with my shortcuts in them, but they were constantly getting accidentally dragged out of place and mysteriously disappearing after restarts. The start menu becomes ridiculous, with all those unnecessary folders with uninstall exes and readme's in every folder. I'm not stupid, i can find them in the programs folder! I would clear all of them out and make single program shortcuts with no folders. Every time i installed a new program, i had to take it out of it's start menu folder and fix it. Ridiculous.

My external harddrive crashed my PC every time i plugged it in. It has never happened on my mac, and that is a beautiful thing.

My first Mac computer was the 12" Powerbook, which was 5 months ago. There is just soo much to love about Mac Computers. The dock is very useful and gorgeous. Mac comp are very simpe and customizable. I remember as a XP user i tried installing the "dock wanabe" on my PC and it only made that crap go even slower.

I recently bought a 17" HP media center and i love it. Its very nice. I also bought my Macbook (black 13" 200GB HD, 2.0 GHZ, 2 GB Ram) and gosh is it gorgeous. I love the sleep mode, its nice easy and fast. Also I noticed that PC takes forever to shutdown or restart, where MB is just sooo fast for me.

I must own a Window based comp just because its more compatible. I love the fact that Macbooks are gorgeous.. Macbooks makes my college student life very easy. Its amazing cause i hated the fact that MB looked like a rectangle but now i love the size.

I just wish that more software, games and just the whole i-net world would give apple comps a chance and be compatible with us lol? excluding the viruses of course, that i definitely don't need.

Well I first got a G3 iMac (DV 400MHz) this April just to introduce myself to Macs and see how I get on with it, after getting so annoyed with Windows in general.

The best things in my opinion are the much nicer hardware and software design, how it doesn't randomly slow down and how simple using external peripherals are. Just plug in a printer or external HDD and in 2 seconds its ready. No need to 50 million popup balloons saying 'found new hardware' and 'searching for drivers' and stuff like that.

And on the 1st November, I brought a G4 Cube + 17" LCD because I needed a bit more power than a G3, but I don't really have much room for a tower. Being a student with no money and about £250 saved up, my choice was either a used Cube or 1.25GHz Mac Mini without monitor. I went for the Cube because it's pretty rare in the UK and has amazing styling (friends can't believe it is 5 years old!) and the key factor is that its upgradable. All I need to do is save up for a CPU upgrade and it should perform better than a Mac Mini!

My G3 iMac has been passed to my sister, who has also converted to Macs now!

I will be buying a MacBook Pro for uni next September.

Ever since i have switched i just feel like im in the right era of time, what i mean by this is after you use OS X you can really see for yourself this is how an OS should be to-date unlike XP or even Vista!

Smooth and nicely laid desktop.
Nice widgets
Great application viewer (Shows all Application with a flick of the mouse)

Not to mention updates are flawless and even the idea of no threats as of yet this couldn't get better.

Start up time is amazing and when running any program within OS X you can feel premium at your finger tips.

When i goto work and use XP systems all day i just feel out dated and old and even think its slowing my productivity down.

i won't beat a dead horse and say i love how it works, looks, etc (but i really do). i grew up using apple products my entire life. i had a few older apple machines when i was a kid, and the school distric i was in had apples too. but once i graduated high school (right before os 9 came out) i didn't have any money to buy a new g4 like i wanted, so i just picked up a used pc and learned how to use it. after getting fed up with pc's crappiness and started caring about what computers i used, i picked up a used g3 ibook last month.

this is awesome. it just feels right. everything is where i always thought it should be, it's more stable, and os x is incredible. i've still got some pc hang-ups to get over, but i can say i'll never go back, unless the macintels start having problems.

but i hated dashboard. all i really needed it for was the weather widget, so i trashed it. i ended up going wtih (dear god forgive me) yahoo widgets, since i can place my weather widget on my desktop, and fade it in with the background.

and aside from the free stuff i've gotten off of mac hiest (that i don't actually need or use, but it was free and it was a prize, so dammit i'm gonna keep it!) and some graphics programs, i haven't needed any third party programs. safari rules, mail rules, ichat rules, ical rules, iphoto rules, itunes rules (duh), it all rules.

now i just need to get some scrape together for a g5 tower and some monitors for the home base. the only thing i would need xp for is autocad, so i'm trying to learn vectorworks so i never have to see that stupid window's logo ever again.

deserves a bump...

I love how I bought this thing because I could run Windows either via Boot Camp or Parallels, but because Mac OS X is both much more fun to use and has practically every application I need, I actually don't USE Windows. Once I get Office 2007 for Mac, Parallels is just gonna sit there on my desktop unused for weeks, even months, at a time :yinyang:

I also love VirtueDesktops. Definitely makes working on a small screen MUCH easier (not to mention the cool factor when flipping the cube). Did I mention my Mac is just more fun to use?

What I love so far.

Dell: 14 days to ship the computer. 3-5 day shipping is 80+ dollars.

Apple: 2 hours to ship, over night shipping 27 dollars.

I don't even have it yet and I have good things to say about it. And I've never been a mac fan.

I just got mine yesterday(for Christmas) and I love it. The thing I first noticed is that how much faster it is than my old PC, of course my PC was a piece of junk. Firefox comes up in half a second. It is very esthetically pleasing too.

I am looking forward to learning all about my new Mac. I am glad I got it.

Once I have more time with it, I will find that much more to like.

I really love how fast my new MacBook Pro is, which is my new Mac purchase.

But what I would have said is how great the service is.

If you call Dell, HP, etc. you will 99.9% of the time get someone from India that you won't be able to understand (and there is no intended racism or prejudice involved in this statement). What they will do is walk you through a million steps which will take approximately 3 hours to achieve nothing.

When you call someone from Mac you will get someone that knows what they're talking about and will most likely have a solution for you in a short matter of time.

Like I said, there is nothing wrong with people from India or any other place, but it is wayyy more convient to talk to someone that you can understand than someone from a different place that is hired because they are cheaper than someone else.