Switched to a Mac
Well, I've made the big switch. I'm now officially a Mac user, with all of the greatness and suckage that entails. I made the switch to get a professional & consistent GUI, available commercial software, and great media editing capabilities built on Unix. So far, I'm happy that I'm getting most of what I wanted.
That isn't to say the transition has been without pitfalls. I was ready to throw the thing out earlier this week due to two issues. The first one turned out to be the 802.11g access point I got at the same time as the Mac. For the record, I strongly recommend avoiding the Linksys 802.11g WAP. It dropped me off the network multiple times an hour using both WEP and WPA security. I switched to Netgear yesterday afternoon, and haven't dropped off of the network yet.
The second highly annoying issue turned out to be a bad interaction between a new feature in Tiger and Microsoft Entourage (the Outlook replacement on the Mac). Spotlight indexing caused Entourage to stop responding for 8-10 seconds at a time on a regular basis (every few minutes). Telling Spotlight to stay away from my Entourage data completely cleared that one up.
The suckage side of using the Mac has to do with the differences in supported software. I can't download transactions from my bank's web site in either Firefox for the Mac or Safari. I can't even fill out the *#@# form to send them mail that I can't download the transactions. When I called, I was told it was a known issue, but given no timeframe for a fix. Time for a new bank.
Additional suckage comes from significant feature differences between commercial apps built for the Mac vs. Windows. These range from the trivial and obvious (but highly annoying), such as the fact that you cannot set Entourage to move to the previous e-mail in your inbox when you move or delete the current message; your only choices are to close the viewer window or move to the next message. For someone who gets ~150 work e-mails a day, I absolutely need to read the most recent in the thread first, and then go back from there. The inability to do that in Entourage is just completely ridiculous, since it can't be more than a day's worth of development work.
Also highly annoying but much harder to fix, there are major functionality gaps. For example, if you're an Outlook user on Windows and you're filing your e-mails to .pst files, there is NO utility to import these to the Mac. I'll write a whole separate discussion of what I had to do to get my e-mail transferred over, but I'll tell you it involved an additional software purchase, ~30 hours of runtime, and downloading a freeware program that clicked a button in a Microsoft Security patch dialog automatically every 10 minutes. Ridiculous.
And did I forget to mention that Macs come with an Office 2004 test drive program which you have to uninstall before you install Office 2004? I bought my Office 2004 copy with my Mac, and installed it before I did anything else. Now when I click on an office document, I get nagged that my demo copy is going to expire. Microsoft provides no tools or documentation if you didn't RTFM before installing and are now stuck with both on your machine. Since there's no printed documentation anyway, why would you read documentation before you do the install? If Microsoft new this when they wrote the docs, why didn't the installer developers know this and prompt to remove the demo first?
If you're keeping score and seeing that I've mostly been slamming Microsoft, Quicken is next on the list. One would imagine that Quicken 2005 for the Mac is feature-equivalent to Quicken 2005 for Windows, right? Nope. First, there is only limited ability to convert data from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for the Mac. If you do some manual tasks, you can import most of it, but not all. There are key account types (ESPP, 401k, etc.) that were available in Quicken 2004 for Windows that are not available in Quicken 2005 for the Mac. I guess Microsoft owns Quicken now anyway, so maybe I'm still bashing Microsoft...
Of course the worst part about being a new Mac user and complaining about this stuff is that the rest of the Mac users just tell you that you're really a Windows user at heart if you whine about this kind of stuff. Oh well...
Having vented, the Mac is still way cooler than a Windows box, and much easier to use than a Linux box.