17 years on Windows, finally on Mac (my story)

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum, and if I just wanted to share my personal switching story from PC to Mac.

I am personally pretty technically minded, as my introduction to computers started somewhere in 1993-1994 -in my teens- with a 268 AT computer which came with DOS only (and Norton Commander), as it wouldn't fluently run Windows 3.1. Over the years I had various PC's running Windows 95/2000/ME/XP and finally -yeah- Vista since 2008. I never bothered to upgrade it to Windows 7 for various reasons (one of them being afraid to screw it up, as happened before)

In 2011 I bought my first Apple product (iPhone4 16GB) as I was totally fed up with the (what they called) Nokia's flagship the N97, which in the end turned out to be a crap phone. What bothered me most about my Nokia was the amount of time and work I had to put into it to make it work property, secondly it would connect very poorly with my Toshiba laptop. It would recognise my Nokia, then it wouldn't, it wouldn't properly transfer data and so on. I finally persuaded myself to buy an iPhone4 (on contract) which cost me 199 EURO after I did some extensive research (e.g. reading a ton of reviews). I have to say, I never considered Android for one second. I tried a few of their phones, but they were unintuitive to say the least ...

Buying the iPhone (and later getting my wife one as well) was the best choice I could have made. I needed a smartphone, which was indeed smart (and good looking) and the last thing I wanted was something that I needed to tweak constantly (which to me is a waste of time, as I have better things to do). I will skip my love story about the iPhone, but it did convince me to go a step further,and around October 2011 I purchased an iPad2, and went all the way by selecting the 64GB/3G version. My daughter of 2 years and 2 months old,who was already introduced to the iPhone previously, also loved it, and mastered the 4-finger swipe (application switching) before I even knew this gesture existed!


Another 6 months passed, and I got an Apple TV 3rd generation for my birthday wanting to semi-complete the circle. The reason I bought an Apple TV was for the Airplay connectivity as well as my Toshiba laptop being unable to properly stream any video through DLNA (that almost made me decide to smash it!)

The only missing link in my Apple story seemed to be the switch from PC to Mac, which I considered was a biggie after spending 17 years on Windows. I did a lot of research myself for about a year, watched the Keynote on Mountain Lion (and many other Keynotes), went a few times to an Apple re-seller (in the country I live we dont have Apple stores), to test them out. My Toshiba laptop by now had a broken screen -I used a seperate 19” monitor- , and Windows was slowing down constantly. Just opening up a new email in Windows Mail would sometimes freeze and take 30 seconds for no bloody reason (and trust me, I tweaked my PC and maintained it pretty well). Even my laptop specs were still good (2,5 Ghz, Dual Core, 3GB Ram, 640 GB hard disk,512 MB video memory), but I grew more frustrated by the day as also all my USB ports started to become faulty, not allowing me to attach/connect an external hard disk to it or other 3rd party devices.I literally wasted tens of hours trying to solve this, and in the end I just gave up. Funny fact is: the iPhone always connected through USB, and was one of the few (read 2) devices, properly connecting to my PC.

Then 2 weeks ago, I made the decision to say farewell to Microsoft for good and bought a Macbook Pro (2012 edition, 2.5Ghz i5). Setting it up was done in a breeze, and being familiar with the iPhone/iPad, the gestures were extremely helpful. First thing I did, was installing Office (as still the majority of documents I deal with are in Word and Excel), installed VNC, Skype, Twitter as well as all the iLife applications and iWork applications.

As I am not a power user, I thought the entry Macbook Pro would be suficient. Reason being is that what I did most on the PC was browsing the web, answering email, listening to some music, and making the odd home movie once in a while.

My next step (and this what worried me most) was to transfer my files and contacts from my PC to my Mac. There is some special transferring software, but I quickly decided to do it my way. I opened a server connection from the Mac to the PC (with shared folders) and little by little transferred all my pictures, music and other files over. This actually was much more effective than using this migration tool. Getting over my Windows address book was a bit more complicated due to bad formatting from the side of Windows Mail. I edited in the end some fields in the Contacts file (using Excel on the Mac) and it imported all my contacts correctly in Outlook for Mac.

Then I thought of transferring all my old emails (22000 of them, 16 GB in total), but then I thought. Why? Most of it contains finished work anyhow, and transferring 16GB just for the sake of being able to ”look back” at what I did in the past, didn't cut it for me. So I skipped this.

In the end I decided to have Outlook for Mac handle my business email, and Mail for Mac all my private email (Yahoo accounts). For anything else that I didn't know how to handle, I simply used Google to get me the answer. And yes, one of them was ”How to right click on a Mac”.

Since I own the iPhone and iPad I am more productive and creative, and with my Mac I am picking up my old hobby of recording music (I am a piano player for over 25 years), as I gave that up on Windows as I was unable to get music software (Cubase) working on a PC. The 2nd day I had the Mac, I hooked my midi keyboard to it, and started recording in Garageband without ANY sort of latency problems. It just worked wonderfully!

I have now been using my new (1st) Mac for over 2 weeks, and I think it is utterly utterly brilliant. I find the operating system so much more intuitive, so much easier to work with, and it perfectly connects and syncs with my other Apple devices. I probably still have to get rid of some Windows habits, but what makes me happy the most is that I don't have to tweak things in a hundred ways to get it done or wonder why something does not work.

What counts for me is reliability and ease of use. Even though I thought tweaking was fun (or necessary), I finally started to understand that I have way better things to do with my time. The whole Apple concept of ”it just works” did it for me and makes my life so much easier.

Being a new Mac user, I might come up once in a while with some questions (in case Google doesnt provide me the right answer), and I hope you guys can help me out.

Interesting story for sure. Thanks for sharing.

Welcome to Mac Forums. If we can help in any way, just let us know!

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Congratulations. I was luckier than you IT specialist at local university said 'Buy a Mac - they are idiot proof' and so it has worked since 1990!

Great story, and may I compliment you on your English (I don't know if its a first or second language for you).

Your story sorta sounds like mine i finally bought a mac after getting fed up with my annoying windows viruses and problems with wireless cards and USB ports. I am happy to hear that another person has seen the beauty of using a Mac.

-double post

Thanks guys.

@chas_m English is actually my 2nd language so to say. My native language is Dutch, and my 3rd language is Romanian.

Showoff!!

and my Macbook Pro has an Italian layout (a bit annoying, but it saved me locally 350 EURO)

Just to follow up my story from 2012....

One evening I sent a cheeky e-mail to Steve Ballmer (yeah!) stating something ”On a Mac After 17 years of Windows, why should I consider coming back?”. This email was sent after I of course purchased my Mac and had been using it for quite some time.

Thinking nothing of it (as I did it out of sheer fun), low and behold ...the next day I got a phone call from Microsoft Headoffice in the country where I live and was invited to meet them and to see/experience their product range. Talking about a ”Hey the CEO has read my email” moment

Well, I don't mind free coffee and a cookie , and I am not afraid of going into the lion's den, so I went. Nicely dressed, with my Macbook in my bag, my iPad on the side, and with my iPhone5 on the table (lol). I was well prepared . I actually had a nice conversation with the guys from MS , and they did show me some new things they have (but of course not enough to ditch any of my Apple products, I'd rather die!).

But in the end I was not very impressed (they also did not even have a Surface tablet at head office to show) and their Windows phones (al though without the lagging that Android has) did not impress me either also mainly due to the poor app selection at the time (which is still the case). Microsoft gave me a Sony Vaoi hybrid tablet/PC to try out for a few weeks, which I did.



But it really started collecting dust in 2-3 days after the novelty wore off and my daughter (who is 4 years and completely masters all iOS devices and partially my Mac) was getting extremely frustrated with the Sony (and Windows 8 on it). The experience of a touch screen/with physical keyboard was kind of nice though (not extremely helpful, but acceptable). The overall quality of this device was poor to say the least, and very pricy as well! (more expensive than my 13” Macbook Pro)

When I left the meeting, I received an Office 365 1 year subscription for free, 20GB of Skydrive space and 60 international Skype minutes for a year. Setting up Office 365 -which I did on the Vaio I had on borrow -not my Mac- and linking your MS ID to your Skype account was typically Microsoft: extremely frustrating and time consuming. I got it to work due to the fact that I have some computer skills, god help those we don't!

To make a long story short: I brought back the Sony Vaio to Microsoft (and it crashed completely the day before! Really!), and havent touched Office 365 (even if I could use it on my Mac, I just don't want the frustration of dealing with it as I use the iWork suite) and happily am consuming those 60 international Skype minutes per month. Thank you Mr Ballmer!

As a courtesy, I sent Ballmer an email to thank him for the fact he actually did something with the email I sent him, and for the perks I received after meeting his colleagues at MS headdoffice

His response? (with his local MS guys in CC)




And not to upset Mr Ballmer, I did not tell him that making the switch back to Windows is not in my future plans for the next 150 years!

I too used to be a fan of windows until vista came out. vista never did work right and i wasn't that crazy about windows xp… a friend of mine gave me a g3 iMac a few years ago and said see what you think about apple. i used the iMac the first time it was running os x 10.4.11 and fell in love with apple and the os. i now have a 20 inch iMac, a mac mini and a black macbook. I will never go back to windows and microsoft even if they paid me to do so, Apple products rock!!

That's quite an experience and one I'm sure you'll remember for quite a while. Too bad the demo unit was a VAIO. Haven't been impressed with their gear in quite some time.

Too bad the demo unit was a VAIO. Haven't been impressed with their gear in quite some time.

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Yeah, Sony has gone downhill fast. Good friend of mine had one which spent more time at the Sony repair facility in Dallas than it did with him. After 6 months of aggravation with the thing and many complaints and trips into Dallas, they finally refunded his money. He purchased a MBA instead and has never looked back since.

Great story! And thanks for the very interesting follow-up!

My mom has had an iPhone since the 3GS and has upgraded to iPhone 4 and now iPhone 5. She switched over to a MBP a few months ago after beginning a job in an office that only uses Macs (late 2012 iMacs). She simply fell in love with OSX. She passed on her 2 yr old HP Win 7 laptop to my dad to replace an aging Dell desktop running XP that I gave them a year or two ago. He quickly expressed frustration with how slow it is playing Popcap games online, and so they have now ordered a refurbished iMac to replace the HP laptop. He is a bit of a dinosaur and extremely stubborn (refuses to have a smart phone and simply will NOT text), but I'm confident in time he will learn how to get along in OSX. He used Macs for many years in a graphics company setting (1980's - 2006), so it's just a matter of catching up with the newer OS.

Classy move on Ballmer's part. Bravo to him.

I actually root for MS to do better, I thought the Metro/RT interface was Microsoft's "OS X moment" and that they had a shot at becoming great again. Ironically, their own user base is determined to destroy them (this could easily have been Apple circa 2000 or so, you know) and I think they will retreat from RT which would be a shame.

I don't want to switch to RT or anything else, but I guess I like my alternatives to be ACTUAL alternatives, not "bad copy of Apple stuff" like Android and (traditional) Windows. If I tired of iOS for some reason, why would I want a Java-driven, laggy take-off on it? Wouldn't I want something totally different that didn't have obvious roots in the thing I was getting away from?

(and before Van jumps in, I acknowledge that Android, like Windows, has come up with some of their own stuff, and that Apple's stuff is also built upon concepts not invented at Apple -- but come on, we all know where the roots of Android and Windows spring from.)

chscag said:

Yeah, Sony has gone downhill fast. Good friend of mine had one which spent more time at the Sony repair facility in Dallas than it did with him. After 6 months of aggravation with the thing and many complaints and trips into Dallas, they finally refunded his money. He purchased a MBA instead and has never looked back since.

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I've had friends had similarly frustrating experiences with Toshiba notebooks. I've watched a few of those gloriously crash and burn.

chas_m said:

(and before Van jumps in, I acknowledge that Android, like Windows, has come up with some of their own stuff, and that Apple's stuff is also built upon concepts not invented at Apple -- but come on, we all know where the roots of Android and Windows spring from.)

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Sure we do. Android has it's roots in Linux and Windows Phone in, well, Windows.

Ooookay. Suuuure they do. In fact, ISTR that Windows popped out fully formed from Gates' head, like one of Zeus' children.

chas_m said:

Ooookay. Suuuure they do. In fact, ISTR that Mac OS popped out fully formed from Jobs' & co's head, like one of Zeus' children.

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Made a little change (no point in rewriting it).

It's even more obvious with OS X - an operating system with a Mach kernel (Carnegie Mellon University's baby), parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD forming the Unix-y goodness and forks of major software such as KHTML (WebKit is hardly a unique piece of code).

It all doesn't matter - we should be focused on the experience, not trying to root "innovation" in histories of adaptation.

Nobody here claimed that OS X was a wholly original invention. You inferred that Windows and Android owe nothing to the Mac and iOS (respectively), a laughably silly sentiment that I can only assume was an attempt at sarcasm. Happy Thanksgiving!

chas_m said:

Nobody here claimed that OS X was a wholly original invention. You inferred that Windows and Android owe nothing to the Mac and iOS (respectively), a laughably silly sentiment that I can only assume was an attempt at sarcasm. Happy Thanksgiving!

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The basic GUI came from Jobs's NEXT computers Next Step OS. I have a video of Jobs demonstrating Next Step back when he was still with Next. It made my jaw hit the floor! I wanted it! Grin

Happy Thanksgiving!!