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I did it. Being a disciple of Windows for all my life this wasn't easy. I have a brand new MacBook on my table now and I am feeling good. I did not setup a decision matrix nor did I made a TCO evaluation.
The one singular reason that made the decision very easy was Vista. I bought a Sony notebook some months ago for my parents that had Vista Home on it (sorry, Dad). I owned some Sony notebooks in my like and I thought this is no-brainer. This notebook has a switch to power WLAN on and off. For some reason you see this on most notebooks. There is a driver for this switch and every time I login to the notebook, the driver requires administrator privileges to run. Under Vista, this means it is asking the user. No way to tell him not to ask again.
I know some people, especially in the IT business try to sell you annoyances as security, but this is taking it too far: It is rendering the complete security subsystem void: It requires me to tell everybody the administrator password. There are some workaround for this on the net, but no-one worked for me.
When it was time for me to buy a new notebook I thought that I would purchase anything but Vista. I was having a look at some Linux but quickly found that a MacBook is by far the best option.
Here is my experience report. I separated it into the applications that I have ported or switched to.
I have been using Windows Media Player and iTunes simultaneously on my old notebook. It was no fun keeping both in synch. Windows Media Player was for synchronizing music files with my mobile phone while iTunes synchronized with my iPod. Synchronizing with the mobile phone didn't really worked. From time to time ActiveSync would forget to store music on the SD card and fill up the phone's memory instead.
I decided to switch to iTunes completely and give up music on my phone.
Some 2 weeks after I copied my music library onto the Mac I found out that 2 albums I purchased on iTunes were missing. When I synchronized my iPod for the first time, iTunes told me that there is purchased music on it and asked me to transfer it to my Mac. Some features come exactely in time.
I have been using Office under Windows a lot. Yes, there is Office for Mac but it feels like moving into your ex-girlfriend's appartment. iWork is the cheaper opportunity. iWorks is easier to use and you will produce more pleasant documents as opposed to Office documents. Just open iPages and type a sentence. Then do the same thing in Word and notice the difference. Times New Roman is really the last thing I am missing.
Of course, you can import all the Office documents with iWork.
What about email? I left Office and so I have no Outlook (Office for Mac calls it Entourage) any more. I have all my emails in a single PST-file and I never deleted a single one. The solution was to import the PST-file with Thunderbird (on the Windows machine). Thunderbird produces MBOX-files which can be imported again using Mac Mail.
I already talked about my cell phone. It is a Windows Mobile 5 device that used to synchronize using ActiveSync. The only solution here is to purchase third-party software. Missing Sync synchronizes all information between a Windows Mobile phone and the Mac databases.
I would have never switched from Windows without a security net: What happens if something does wrong? What happens if you need to open some old file format again? What happens if you have some applications and there is no usable option for the Mac?
You can purchase a copy of Windows XP and use boot camp. This is essentially a set of drivers so that you can run Windows XP (and Vista) on your Mac. On every reboot you can decide which operating system to launch.
This is ok, but there is a much more flexible option: Virtualization. There are currently 2 usable options: Parallels and VMWare Fusion. I decided to use Fusion because it supported more memory and processors in virtual machines. Now I can start a virtual machine and run Windows XP to access my old data. The penalty for running the virtualization is about 7% of the machine's power.
Adium was my choice for an IM client. It supports a lot of protocols and let me run a single client instead of one for every protocol.
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