Considering switch from PC

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First off, I'll do my best to search for my answers prior to posting as I'm sure they've been asked already, and I already read the VERY helpful sticky's, thanks to whomever put them together.

I'm a lifelong PC user who is sick of spending my days working around problems and viruses and have been convinced Mac may make life easier. It may be clever marketing, but we'll see :)

I work with IT, so I'll always need access to Windows to test apps and whatnot in the environment they'll be sued in, but I'm not a dev so I'm not overly concerned about this and think Parallels will meet my need for the couple hours a week I'll need Windows.

However, I'm a consultant so I'm frequently shuttled from company to company and never know exactly what type of network environment I'll be in. My fear is that I'll be unable to access a network someplace because of Mac, although I would think that it wouldn't matter, if a PC can get an IP, so can a Mac. Is this a legit concern?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2015 Retina 4K iMac. Monterey. 8GB RAM. Crucial 500GB external SSD
Mac OSX is all based on open standards for networking. DHCP, DNS, HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, FTP, NFS, SMB/CIFS. I would think you would have no issue connecting a mac to most networks.
 
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Hmm...

Yours is an interesting question. Since you absolutely require a computer for your job and absolutely need to connect to your clients' networks, your concerns are valid. After all, a Macintosh is a pretty significant investment.

This example might not pertain to you, but a vendor once came to our company bringing his Macintosh notebook with a PowerPoint presentation that he wanted to show on our overhead projector. Try as he might, he simply couldn't get his Mac to communicate with our projector.

Although the Mac indeed uses open source networking standards, there's no guarantee that your clients' networks will. Before making a substantial investment in a Mac, you might want to experiment by installing Linux on your PC in a dual-boot setup. This will cost you nothing except time. Since Linux and OS X share a common pedigree, if you don't run into connectivity problems on your clients' networks using a Linux PC, it's almost certain that you will be just fine with the Mac.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Black Colorware PowerBook 1.67 GHz G4, 2 GB DDR2, 100GB 7200 RPM
Worst comes to worse, you'll be able to connect in Windows via Parallels (or VMWare Fusion, or that other free one I forget, or BootCamp), though again, I can't imagine you running into problems.
 

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