Windows

50 Reasons To Switch To Mac And One That Makes Me Stay With Windows

Posted by on May 8, 2009 | 5 Comments

Gnomie Tomislav A. Markovic writes in from Italy:

Dear Chris,

I’ve been considering going to Mac for some years now. Finally, I am almost there (only because of VM).

However, this email is written in Outlook 2007. Over the years I have collected some 12 GB of emails, contacts, and appointments. I can always find out where I was, who I can contact, and what happened in some period of my private or business life. I think Outlook’s a great piece of software, and it’s remained compatible with later versions for years, as you know. You can just copy and paste your Outlook.pst file from any PC to another, from one version to another, and it works. You can open it like any other file inside of the program. Great and easy. AND STABLE!

What to say about the synchronization with Win Mobile? Great! Just plug in and that’s it!

I was astonished to learn that there is no way to import my Outlook mails, contacts, appointments, and everything else in any Apple application. None at all. I’ve read some texts about using Thunderbird as a translator to do it — but why? There is Entourage and it does not work! Blaah! I’ve tried it and it is a piece of…

Although Apple has nicely designed hardware, a very stable OS, and excellent graphics, if I buy it I’ll still have to use Windows — probably more than OS X. Why? Well, I can’t import my emails! And I have tons of docs in Word and Excel format (while I can use these in OS X, I’ll still lose some features. My Adobe CS4 suite that costs over €3,000 here in Europe doesn’t work in Mac, so I’m expected to buy a new version. (No way!) My Office 2007 is just a great piece of software — and a costly one. I’ve used Vista from the first day without any problems or crashes at all. No crashes in two years, now.

And presume I buy a Mac Pro, with Quad Xeon (maybe 2.93 MHz), 16 GB of RAM, RAID controller (I’d buy HDD by myself instead of paying for WD € 260), and I would really like to have 2 x 24″ new LED Displays. But I can’t! There is no graphics card, not even from Apple, that supports something called Mini Display Port, and there are no adapters whatsoever. I would spend €7,000 for hardware to have a €300 graphic card (ATI 4850) that would give me at least one Mini Display Port. And the other one? It seems I’d need another graphics card!

I wanted an nVidia Quadro FX 3800 or 4800. 4800 comes for Mac (per a recent announcement), but with 2 x DVI. Are these people crazy? And there is no monitor from Apple that you can buy that is not Mini Display Port. So you spend $ 1.800 for nVidia Quadro FX 4800 for Mac and you cannot connect an Apple LED display? Come on! This is complete marketing failure. A workstation today must have an option for a pro graphics card.

Besides not being able to access my Outlook-based emails, this is another very good reason to hold off on switching to a Mac.

  • Nancy Wilson

    I happened upon your article and pretty much everything you say is wrong. There many ways to transfer Outlook data to Apple Mail, Entourage, etc… This for one:

    http://www.littlemachines.com/
    yes it cost $10

    Aslo did you ever hear of a Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Video Adapter? The 24 inch LED display is really meant for the Macbook and MacBook pro which have Mini Display ports there ARE adapters. A 2 minute search proved most of what you say wrong, not sure where you get your info.

  • Ted Bruner

    I could not agree more. However, having used Adobe products at work and at home, I’m finished with them as well. I recently had a wife (sweet thing) purchase me a new Vista unit – Toshiba P305D 64-bit, yadayada. It cannot even install my old PageMaker 6.5 program, so I’m out already. For my wife, I have installed an old version of Corel Paint and Draw on an old XP Acer laptop. We work with Adobe every day at the plant and it’s just too bloated and hardware-consuming to bother with there either; but since it’s a publishing firm, I guess that’s not going to happen soon.
    I understand the UK has a program called PagePlus, and I want to learn as much about that as I can. I was hoping to dump the Adobe, but want some of the features it offered in such things as InDesign 2.x. I’m not asking for a lot, just the ability to soften edges of graphics boxes for whatever graphics I may want to put in them from time to time.

    As for OS X; that’s a bust in my opinion as well. I have a friend who – having been forced to use Mac for years – found many ways to make it work for him, but it’s not pleasing to me, and the prices – whoa!

    I came from a C/PM background and like speed, simplicity and ease of operation. I loved WordStar, but hated Word Perfect – a very good reason: each successive release brought a new learning curve. I’m not all that pleased that Vista-64 so closely emulates OS-X in its “Explorer” functions, but I can get along with that. Adobe has played lawless with their “features” to the point that it’s anybody’s guess what may happen when we try to overcome some dysfunction(s) in the day-to-day routine of trying to produce usable pages for print.

    I know there’s a plethora of Mac users out there who love their stuff, but – apart from one – most of them can’t produce much other than “fritter-ware”, and that’s not exciting me one bit.

    To be fair, I’m not putting much hope into Windows 7, but will just muddle along a year or two behind the newbie rush, and see what I can use of all this new “stuff”.

    Bon chance, mon ami.

  • Tom Hogan

    Adobe has a cross grade program so that as long as your on the current version, you can go to the Mac version for free (may have to pay shipping). You supposedly have to sign something saying you’ll never use your Windows copy again.

  • Wm Shore

    Of all the programs I’ve ever used WordPerfect has had the fewest changes from version to version and, thus, the shortest learning curve. Like you I pine for the speed and utility of the DOS days but I think you need some perspective – compared to the 800 pound gorilla (MS Office) Wordperfect has almost NO new learning curve from version to version and features like reveal code and full PDF editing support make it a joy to use – although I’m not trying to convert MS Office users (I recognize my own prejudice in this and that this is a religious issue for many – and I hate religious issues). Use whatever works for you (and I have a Mac, it’s not perfect but – compared to WinXP, a joy to use). Again, use whatever works for you, though.

  • dust

    pointeless, your statements are all wrong..
    word and excel lol, you can use mcrosoft office license on mac too, or go openoffice, that work too..
    cs4 is for mac also..and 12gb of emails? wtf…even after 100 years is impossible, at least for text one..
    i guess you tried to be ironic, but fail, due to the fact, that you talk without know anything about mac, you like your os, stay with that…apple dont put a gun on your head, saying buy my stuff, virtual machine would be enough for outlook too…