It has now been four months since I first bought my iMac, it was the first Macintosh computer I have ever used. There were various reasons as to why I decided to buy one. The main reasons were for my web site design and artwork that I do both as a hobby and as part of a degree currently. I also got it for the simple fact that it looked far better (yes I am shallow like that). So what has it been like making the change over from Windows to the Mac OS?

The biggest change for me has to have been the feel of the operating system. Going from using Windows for 10 years, to a Mac isn’t the easiest thing to do, but I can certainly see why completely new computer users find a Mac better and easier to use, because for beginners they are almost perfect. The complaints I have heard from many Windows users are mostly to do with the lack of programs on the Mac OS, but I can’t say that this has been a problem for me, I have all the programs I used on my PC, here on my Mac…Dreamweaver, Microsoft Office, Photoshop and more, some of which are actually better than their PC counterparts.

That isn’t to say I don’t see Windows users points of view here, I can understand completely that If there are programs you use in the Windows environment that are not available on the Mac, what is the point of switching? Well I would say to them, search out an alternative if you can, because using my iMac has been a dream with no problems at all, something I cannot say for my Windows computer.

There are also a few more improvements over programs that Windows users have, I find Apple’s Safari browser to be superior to that of Internet Explorer, I didn’t think I would do at first – but since using it from the beta 2 release, I have to say it has become my first choice when browsing the internet on any computer. But this isn’t the only place where my Mac goes ahead of my Windows PC, iTunes is another example of great Apple work, and it is easy to use, plays music brilliantly and “it just works”. It doesn’t try to do too much in one program like Windows Media Player. The only downside to this is that I find some of the speaker equipment for the Mac too expensive to shell out on.

Next we have photo work, I have very recently got a new Digital Camera (a Nikon Coolpix 5000, which is well worth getting if you get the chance) which, when connecting to my PC, needed drivers added, Nikon software installed etc – and the software ran slow on my Windows PC (An Athlon 2100), but when using the Camera with my Mac, I can get my photos off of it in seconds (no exaggeration). IPhoto from Apple is another excellent piece of work, so if anyone is thinking of getting a computer to use to edit, transfer and play with their digital camera photos, what ever you do – get a Mac, I could not believe how easy it was to use, or how much better it was to edit photos here.

You can see some of my photos here – http://byronhinson.deviantart.com

So what are the downsides to getting a Mac? Well for a start, I still use my PC to play games, there is no way a Mac right now could handle any of the games that a Pc does, at least not graphically in the same way. Playing Championship Manager 4 on my iMac is very slow when compared to the PC version, but this is clearly the fault of both lack of processor speed and the smaller amount of memory I had in my Mac. So I wait to see if the new G5’s from Apple will make a difference. I hope it does, but then again no one should be buying a PC or a Mac just to play games, that is what a console is for.

There are other things the Mac lacks, a good amount of users for a start (oh sorry that was low), it lacks good conferencing software – Windows has MSN Messenger which supported both Audio and Video in the last release, and has gone one step further since MSN Messenger 6 was released. But we do now have the very promising signs of iChat AV, but the only problem here is that they won’t allow anything other than Firewire webcams/video cameras to be used with it, which may be a good thing for quality, but not for the majority of users who own USB ones already.

So all in all, over the last four months I have started to use my iMac far more than my PC in work terms, but not so much in play due to the lack of gaming quality here on the Mac (but that is never likely to change). But I know that I will be unlikely to ever buy a brand new Windows PC again unless Longhorn improves Windows in many many ways.

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