Thinking of switching from PC to Mac, which one, how hard?

After 20 + years of owning pc's, mainly by dell and i have been happy with them, i am thinking of switching to a mac. Not sure where to start or what to get or how hard it is to run the programs. I can tear apart a pc and do upgrades, etc, currently have a dell xps with a quad core, 16 gb ram, upgraded video card, etc. Was thinking of going to mac since we have ipad, ipad 3, iphone 5. I saw the new iMac coming out soon and was thinking of a 21.5 inch model since prices are so high, would love a 27, but not sure i can get that much. not sure if i should start there, or a macbook or something else. How hard is it to go from using a pc all the time to now learning how to use a mac and the programs it has on it, and where do i get more programs to be like my machine? I use microsoft money, do they have a program like that for mac?

I needs lots of help and info, can anyone help me?

thanks!

The 'conversion' question is popular on this forum.

iMac or Macbook - depends if you need portability.
Ease of learning Mac - very easy. Took some time getting used to the red, yellow, green lights in toolbar (to close, minimize and enlarge); double arrows at other end of toolbar (further enlarge); and "command T" to open another website in Safari. Routine now.
Money-don't use it. Hopefully, others can assist.

I just switched over and I've already got the hang of things You should be fine with your past experience.

My wife switch a year ago and loves her 21.5 Imac..

I've moved your thread to the appropriate forum.

I would suggest spending some time on one either at a store or a friends house, some people are quite happy switching some are not. I have a mac mini that I'm very happy with but my wife's PC is dying so I setup a user account on the mac for her and she hates it so much that we will be replacing her PC. All i'm saying is make sure you are comfortable with it before you buy.

I haven't really ever met anyone who switched to Mac and was UNhappy, particularly if they can recognize and appreciate that the Mac will not be exactly the same experience and don't try to make it "work like a PC."

Basically, though, moving from Windows to Mac is like moving from one fully-furnished house to another fully-furnished house -- you just don't know where everything is yet, but in due course you'll find it perfectly natural.

8 years on and I'm still learning and I honestly feel that I'm still scratching the surface. That said it's not an unpleasant experience...far from, it because the machine and it's OS is constantly surprising me...I don't want to go all misty-eyed with that voyage of discovery stuff but it does feel like that at times.

I would prefer to look at things from the other way around with regards to the switching question. I had the opportunity last week to work on a PC for a few days and I found the whole thing so overblown that I couldn't see the wood for the trees and quickly found myself cursing the thing. I mean how complicated does a piece of word processing software have to be ? It's as if every Tom, Bob and Harry has bolted on a 'special piece of me' into the suite resulting in something akin to The Thing crawling through the middle of a bunch of hatching Alien eggs

Anyway that's my rant over with...here's a link to some reviews of 10 bits of software which help you to choose an alternative to MS Money

Money 2012 | Best Mac Personal Finance Software - TopTenREVIEWS

I should point out that MS themselves discontinued Money quite some time ago, so really its time to find an alternative anyway.

I could do just as good a job with Numbers and a current bank account statement.

It sounds like you're pretty handy at working with hardware...so which ever Mac you get, save your self a lot of money by purchasing your Mac with the lowest RAM available and upgrade to the max yourself...easy, easy. I highly recommend OWC RAM kits.

Dogbreath: generally speaking that's quite correct, but you've apparently forgotten that some models of Mac (such as the Retina MacBook Pros) *cannot* have their memory upgraded later on.

chas_m said:

Dogbreath: generally speaking that's quite correct, but you've apparently forgotten that some models of Mac (such as the Retina MacBook Pros) *cannot* have their memory upgraded later on.

Click to expand...

Add to that the new 21.5" iMac due out in November. Seems to be a trend....