I Switched!

Yes, at long last and after a great deal of research I have become a Mac owner!

I bought a the white Macbook with the Superdrive and 160 gig hard drive. I figured that I can upgrade the memory to 4 gigs and the hard drive to 320 gigs and be better than the black one for the same money.

I'm a student, so I got a free 8gig iPod touch, a $30 wireless printer, $30 off MobileMe (its .Mac for another couple of days) as well as $10 off the cost of the machine! I would've bought a Mac anyway, but the deals Apple gives students are amazing!

To anyone reading this (as I did before I switched), get the Mac you are thinking about. You cannot go wrong. At the very least, even if you HATE Leopard you can run Vista faster than most other machines--you'll love Leopard though. I am on day three and I already have a good handle on things. It really is very intuitive. I was a little wary of dropping to a 13" screen, but it is the perfect size, surprisingly.

My only complaint is iTunes. I don't dig it much at all, as the ID3 tagging features are totally lacking. I have 240 gigs of music that isn't uniformly tagged and I have yet to find a program in OSX that rivals Media Monkey or even Winamp for this. So I have a great deal of work on my hands getting everything nice and neat. A few weeks, actually.....

If you are a power user in the Windows environment, as I am, you will freak out at how easy and fun a Mac is. It means nothing as far as productivity goes, but the Macbook is really sexy to look at. I'm just sayin'...

I switched myself a few days ago. I got a black MacBook and a 32GB iPod Touch. I would say that the black MacBook is a very good deal and machine, given the fact that it can rival the MBP in terms of processing speed and that it has a larger hard drive than the base model. The only thing the black MB doesn't have is a video card like the MBP. That's unique to the MBP though.

But I love Mac!!! It's so elegant in interface, intuitive in use, and is a beautiful computer. I LOVE IT!!

I also have a black macbook which is fairly new to me (about a month now=) and I am in love! Leopard is very intuitive and all you really need is a day or two with it before you are proficient enough do to most standard things. Very fast, very easy to work with, and a highly beautiful machine! Sometimes its just nice to look at how sleek and clean cut it is.

moai said:

My only complaint is iTunes. I don't dig it much at all, as the ID3 tagging features are totally lacking. I have 240 gigs of music that isn't uniformly tagged and I have yet to find a program in OSX that rivals Media Monkey or even Winamp for this. So I have a great deal of work on my hands getting everything nice and neat. A few weeks, actually.....

Click to expand...

Which is why I wrote a little bash script that tags mp3 files based on the name of the tune. I have all my songs named with Artist - Title - Album.mp3 and using a Darwin port (id3v2) and standard command line and bash script logic to take all songs in a folder with the extension .mp3 and with variables and some tricky algorithms will tag the song appropriately. I do this before I import them into iTunes, however.

You have to know a little bit about UNIX and the bash shell, (okay, maybe a lot) however, but it works nice for me.

I did, however, have a few weeks of my own work to make sure all the files were named correctly and thus had some other scripts I needed to write to get that happening what with all the different places I got the music from (old school Napster, recorded from streams, etc.) but it was worth it.