Same with city dwellers, you don’t need a 4×4 so why buy one, in other words IF you are primarily a t’interweb/MS Office user, then use the tool designed for the job, which is of course a Windows based PC

Let me know if you want any buying advise. Or SW advise once bought.

It is, I’d say, time to “suck it and see”.

Chris less so. The “Mac’s good for video and graphics only” argument is a bit old an if you look at the number of first time family buyers easier to disprove.

The base reality is that you can achieve whatever you need to equally well on both machines. The core of what most people do (email, bit of office apps, internet, music, photos etc) can be done on either machine.

However some things suit your style more than others. And by style I don’t mean the looks of the machine, but how it gels with how you work. I used to be a hard card PC user and in those days (pre OSX) windows suited my style far more than Macs. These days it’s quite the reverse, and I find mac’s more pleasurable to work with than PCs, because when I use it, it just works more the way I do.

The same way some writers might use a fountain pen and others might use a pencil. It’s about what suits your style, not that fountain pen users are all about fancy looks and pencil users are all about practicality.

That said, it’s not that each platform doesn’t do some things better than the other. Office is better on the PC than the Mac for obvious reasons. If you’re a hard core office user, you might find the UI and interface for the Mac a little annoying. Some hard core uses (like Will Wynne use parallels and run Windows office in the Mac interface).

The Mac I find is better at many of the little things. The polish. So installing a printer, is a matter of choosing your printer, and it just installs the driver for you off the internet. Accessing a Wifi point also just seems to work better on a Mac. Quicklook (which I believe may be in Win7 but not sure) is a little piece of brilliance and I could almost never move back to a machine without it. Installing an app is dragging and dropping it in “applications”. Uninstalling an app is deleting it from Applications. There are a ton of other examples.

I also find SW wise whilst their is less software generally available, the indie SW (shareware) available is of a much higher standard, as Mac developers (generally speaking) are obsessed about polish. As an author, there is are few new programs such as Writeroom (http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom) for example. I buy a lot of sub $50 software and find most of it fantastic with a level of dedication to sweating the small stuff I didn’t generally find on a PC.

There is a learning curve as the interface is different. However I believe going to Vista/Win7 is not far off the learning curve either. If you’re worried that you wont like it and don’t want to spend the money for something that may annoy you, either spend some good time in the mac store having a play, or listening to one of the sessions in the theatre. I might be able to lend you my old MBP for a couple of weeks too if you would like.

On a final note the mac-twat thing is a bit of a strawman. It’s the same thing you get in anything, sports, north/south divides, universities. It’s a small vocal minority perorating stereotypes on both sides. When people like things they do talk about it, but no more so than anything else. There are as many mac-twats as their are anti-mac p.c. users. Roughly they cancel each other out.

As someone who enjoys using a mac, an yes, does like it. I would suggest you give it ago, as from my experience I think you would enjoy using it. But if it doesn’t gell with you, stick to PCs. I do think it’s worth giving a shot. As I said, if you’re cautious, I think I can lend you a machine for a few weeks to try out.

Adr

“Come on in, the OS is wonderful!”
Bill Greer, Mac Wanker (official)

There are downsides – I find word a bit more fiddly to use on the mac, but it’s not something that really gets in the way, and you get used to the shortcuts and ways around it pretty quickly.

To be honest, you’re never going to get the full low-down on a mac until you’ve spent time playing around with it and learning how it works for you. But there’s a reason why people are evangelical about macs, which is that once you work it out, you see pretty quickly how much better your experience is.

I started using a mac because I was pissed off with the unreliability of the pcs that I used and they’d reached a stage where everything I needed worked on a mac. I wouldn’t switch back because in two years, my mac has never let me down, never lost all my work and never crashed causing me to reboot the whole system.

I’d be more than happy to have a proper chat about it all at some point. And for the record, I used to HATE mac twats who banged on about them all the time – but sadly, that didn’t stop my pc being shit. If your pc works for you though, there’s really no reason to switch.

Currently toying with penguins myself. Rather fun (if suddenly a bit like being thrown back to DOS when I actually had to know how the thing worked…)

(Incidentally if you do buy a mac you’ll be pleased to know they’ve graduated to Intel Chips so by and large if you get fed up you’ll be able to load Windows XP onto that too as soon as you get fed up with MAC OS