Hi all,
I am completely new to Mac, I am an IT Support Engineer, but only really deal with Windows.
I've always dismissed Macs, as I've never had cause to use them, and they seem unjustifiably expensive compared to the equivalent PC, but just lately Microsoft seem to break everything they touch and I really dislike where they're heading with Windows 10, so I figured I'd pick up a cheap second hand Mac and have a play around.
Everyone I know who uses Mac seems very happy with them, and it'll certainly come in handy with my work if I don't have to hand over any Mac related jobs to a colleague, so to eBay I went. Full details of the machine are a bit vague, as the listing was not the greatest (which means I think I have landed myself a bit of a bargain). I believe it is a mid 2011 21.5 inch iMac (listing says it was purchased in 2011, and CPU Speed is listed as 2.5 GHz - previous 2010 model didn't come in 2.5GHz), 12GB RAM and the listing says HDD capacity is 512GB, so I'm guessing it's actually a 500GB HDD.
Obvious questions here are what should I be doing upon arrival of this machine? Assuming this comes with no OS discs is it easy enough to do a clean install, can I download OSX and burn a disc/put it on a flash drive? or would I need to buy new discs from Apple? I know iPhones can remain tied to a particular Apple ID, even with a factory reset. Is the same true for Macs?
Any tips for transitioning from Windows user to macOS user? most useful apps to download etc?
I am completely new to Mac, I am an IT Support Engineer, but only really deal with Windows.
I've always dismissed Macs, as I've never had cause to use them, and they seem unjustifiably expensive compared to the equivalent PC, but just lately Microsoft seem to break everything they touch and I really dislike where they're heading with Windows 10, so I figured I'd pick up a cheap second hand Mac and have a play around.
Everyone I know who uses Mac seems very happy with them, and it'll certainly come in handy with my work if I don't have to hand over any Mac related jobs to a colleague, so to eBay I went. Full details of the machine are a bit vague, as the listing was not the greatest (which means I think I have landed myself a bit of a bargain). I believe it is a mid 2011 21.5 inch iMac (listing says it was purchased in 2011, and CPU Speed is listed as 2.5 GHz - previous 2010 model didn't come in 2.5GHz), 12GB RAM and the listing says HDD capacity is 512GB, so I'm guessing it's actually a 500GB HDD.
Obvious questions here are what should I be doing upon arrival of this machine? Assuming this comes with no OS discs is it easy enough to do a clean install, can I download OSX and burn a disc/put it on a flash drive? or would I need to buy new discs from Apple? I know iPhones can remain tied to a particular Apple ID, even with a factory reset. Is the same true for Macs?
Any tips for transitioning from Windows user to macOS user? most useful apps to download etc?