I have made the switch to Mac
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As I have documented in the past few months I have had interest in moving away from the world of Windows into either Mac or Linux. I gave Ubuntu/Kubuntu/PCLinuxOS a far chance but in the end the experience was less than wonderful. As you can imagine I have driver issues, the applications lacked style and for the most part I ran into random errors that I couldn’t fix, or had the patience to.
Last summer I bought a G4 iMac with Tiger and began to use that almost exclusively for a month, the computer was great but I mostly use my laptop and I prefer it to any desktop, so I upgraded my XP laptop to Vista. I could go through and talk about all of my problems but that could take a little while, so just read my previous post.
Last week I bought a refurbished Macbook for $850 from Apple.com, this Thursday I received the computer. I can honeslty say this is the best computer I have ever used. I appearnce, the speed, the ease of use is making me wonder why I ever used Windows. I have had a great experience so far but I have hit some brick walls,
So here are the 5 things I live and don’t like about Mac so far.
1. SPEED! My computer boots up in about 30 seconds and programs launch almost instantly. When my computer starts there aren’t any annoying programs that start up like with Windows, *cough* MSN messenger.
2.iLife iThank you- I have had so much fun with my pictures, movies and even making crappy music, I lack any talent, with the great iLife suite. GarageBand can keep me busy from school work for hours at a time and iMovie is easy to use and iPhoto is starting to take over Picasa for me.
3. Iwork 08- Great programs but I don’t like the fact that I can’t use my Pages files with Office, seeing as I am a student in a Windows only school. Keynote is awesome and I can’t wait to start making presentations.
*Update, thanks to my readers I now know how to use my Pages files in Word, thanks guys!
4. Weird random issues- Sometimes my Macbooks screen will flicker with movies playing in Quicktime and times the screensaver freaks out and goes from black to my desktop over and over.
5. The cost was amazing- For $850 I got a Macbook 2.0ghz, Apple Remote, and iLife 08, pretty good deal right? Oh wait I get a full 1 year warranty and 90 days of phone support, thanks Apple.
4 Comments
George
April 20th, 2008
at 5:42pm
wait, wait, wait, pages ‘08 IS compatible with office. Ok, if you make a file in pages, go to file>export> and then you can export it as a pdf, doc, or rich text file. pages will also open .docs from office.
shane blyth
April 20th, 2008
at 9:31pm
Why cant you use Pages with office at school?
I choose export and export it in word format fine most of the time. I do have office 2004 for Mac also but only use it if Macros are required which maybe be your problem. Office 2008 I am no fan of and if you do buy Office grab 2004 from somewhere cough or neooffice. Actually do you know that the free textedit with OS X Leopard is Doc compatible and is surprisingly powerful.
Have fun
Jeff
April 20th, 2008
at 11:14pm
Great to hear you love your Mac. Just so you know, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are all completely Microsoft Office compatible. Not only can you open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, but you can save them too. If you need to share your Pages docs with school, with your Pages doc open, click on File and Export. There you can save your document as a PDF or Word file. Numbers and Keynote do the same thing. I never even use Microsoft Office anymore because iWork works so well.
Gudjon
April 21st, 2008
at 1:02pm
Welcome to mac!
I love Keynote. Study “Path animations” they are absolutely amazing!
Pages is great. The key to using it in a Windows environment is File > Export … to PDF if your recipient doesn’t need to do any editing or .doc if the recipient needs to do editing.