Mike Wendland's Top Ten reasons why he's glad he switched

i switched to a mac in sept. 2003. i am an IT mgr at a university. after fixing PCs @ work all day, it is a joy to come home to a computer that is (for the most part) bombproof, and my home is micro$oft free. plus, the operating system is lightyears ahead of micro$oft's current production stuff. thank god my university dept. refused to switch -- micro$oft's crap keeps me employed!

Ellen Feiss is back ! In September 2005, Feiss appeared in the French short film "Bed and Breakfast" due to be released during the summer of 2006. She plays one half of an American couple visiting France who are drawn into a dangerous fantasy world when they visit an old friend at his château.
More news coming soon on http://www.bnb-movie.com
+ http://www.clermont-filmfest.com/00_templates/page.php?m=140&c=6&id_film=100054953&o=23

I switched with a MBP about 4 months ago and haven't looked back. The only annoyences are minor, (I can't get info on multiple items in one window?) and I keep discovering things that make it even better to own a mac.

Nice site switchtoamac. Bookmarked!

All right, I will bite because I just switched.

From linux to mac actually.

1. Availability to commercial software. Office and the games available are the two biggees for me and yes there are more software available for XP but more is not necessarily better. Want proof? Check out Office for the Mac the way the damn suite should have been made to begin with. Sure, there are more games for windows but there are a lot more games for the macintosh than linux that is for sure. Its nice waiting on Civ IV right now.

2. The passion. Listen windows always seemed like an OS made by people who did not really care. mediocre. Linux you could see the love but thousands of developers all around the world on thousands of projects all being put together by hundreds of different distros and it all seems like passion disjointed. On Mac OS X its put together well and you see the passion.

3. Quality of Design. Yes, there have been build/manufacturing issues but the quality of design is outstanding from the front row remote to the backlit keys back to the aluminum case and the magsafe connectors. Quality.

4. Built on unix. No matter how many cygwin unix/win tools you get its not the same. Sure, the command line is a bit different than linux but that is the way it is for any *Nix each one is a bit different. rsync backups are just nice and perl scripts work right and its nice. Commercial desktop OS on top of a real unix.

5. iLife man it just beats the ever living crap out of anything I have seen for linux or Windows. I mean its just incredible and when they say it works just like iTunes they mean it. Easy to pick up.

6. MS Office works better on a mac. I thought that was just zealot talk from the mac faithful but its true things are put together with more care and if they put this much care into all their products then people would respect the company as a whole a lot more I think.

7. It just works means something in the Mac world. Hooking up to wireless? Drop dead easy. Hooking up to my samba server downstairs running Ubuntu? Connecting to my printer shared out on another machine? Easy. No fussing around.

8. Integration between the OS and the machine. The same company that made the OS made the machine so the OS does not feel like some tacked on extra with bits that kind of work or only work through a tool that feels nothing like the rest of your tools on the OS. Or in linux where your laptop multimedia buttons don't work at all.

9. Quality of the OSS apps available. Sure, not everthing on linux is available cocoa style or X11 style on the mac. Sure, most of the best cocoa style OSS apps are at least somewhat based on linux derived code but ... On the mac, Camino, Adium, Seahorse and a ton of other apps just seem to (hard to explain) feel better more natural.

10. The customer support. Listen I did have a build-quality issue with my first macbook pro. I got it declared DOA and returned. The support folks were great it arrived under the expected time and in general the experience was annoying but the service was great.

Before I switched to Mac (I've got an iBook), I used to assemble my Windows/Linux boxes by hand from parts - and it was fun; however I really appreciate the fact that I don't have to think what hardware I've got on my Mac - it just works. On Windows I used to scan my system for spyware once a week - I've never scanned my Mac in more than 2 years! No viruses - my father has got a PC and every time there's harddrive activity or temporary drop in performance, we have a mild virus attack panic :) It's UNIX-based - I love the terminal! Software is generally more thought-thru - it's doesn't make you think unnecessarily - I love that! On Windows I had to re-install the system roughly once in 6 months - had to do it only twice on Mac - once because I messed up with Turkish localization, another one when I was upgrading to Tiger. iSync is amazing - there's just no match for it in Windows world!

I'm also a tech writer and I switched a couple of years ago. I have to disagree with Mike Wendland's sentiments on Office. It does not run better on the Mac.

Entourage is a nice email client and has some interesting funcitonality that isn't in Outlook. But Word and PowerPoint suck. Word is slow and cumbersome. As soon as you get multiple reviewers in a document with changes tracked it slows to a crawl. Microsoft addressed some of the problem with their last Office update but running Word under Rosetta on an MBP I notice that those same issues are back again.

And PowerPoint is so slow it's almost unusable. And that's just viewing other peoples slides, not creating them. I recently put Office on XP under Parallels just so that I could view PPT files quickly. I'm now tempted to run Word under Parallels too. Very sad.

There are many things on my wishlist for Mac OS X but at the top is a realistic alternative to Microsoft Word.

I seemed to have a typo in the URL in post #21. Here's the correction:

http://switchtoamac.com

Hello, my name is Barry, and I am a Macaholic.

I switched four days ago, when I recieved my MacBook in the mail, and I haven't been able to get off of it. My friends have tried to call me, but I've turned off my phone. The lappy is just better looking than all of them. Whenever they IM me and say, "Come out and party/hang out/cow tip with us," I have to kindly refuse, saying that I'm too busy. Then I go back to playing Starcraft.

There's more, though. The cleanliness of the actual laptop is far greater than anything I could ever imagine. It sits there, white and smooth, staring at me sensuously, daring me to go out with anything, when I've got something like this waiting here for me.

And MagSafe draws me in magnetically, and iSight spots me as I consider leaving, and the remote control pauses my worries about needing "food" and water," all of them whispering the same thing, almost as though it is from Little House of Horrors. But it is not "Feed Me, Seymour," they are saying. Oh no, it is far more devilish.

Use Me, Barry.

And how could one leave after being asked as sweetly as all that?

DaveH, in "Mac Excel" just double click in the cell to see the formula. Not sure how to remap it...
BTW, switched to Mac in early '90's, haven't looked back since!