How I Switched to Mac and Survived to Tell the Tale

I bought a Mac.  It’s taking some getting used to.  It’s a bit like being American and adjusting to British English.   I’m a little uncomfortable.  I don’t really know all of the words.  Some of the words I do know don’t mean what I think they mean.  (Really?  Fanny?) That said, I think I’m really going to like it once the natives stop making fun of me.

I’ve never owned a Mac, though I have worked with them before… some graphics stuff, college newspapers… that sort of thing.  Anyway, every computer everything I’ve owned in the GUI era of computing (not jealous of my Tandy experience are you?) is Windows based.  I taught myself Windows 3 and a little DOS about a hundred years ago and have been riding the Microsoft range ever since.  But after the better part of two decades, I’m tired of breaking horses and dodging rattlesnakes.

My decision to switch was not lightly made.  I comparison-shopped.  I worried.  I fought with my wife.  Macs are expensive.  Here’s the thing they don’t tell you though; comparable PCs are at least as expensive as their Mac counterparts.  Sure, you can buy a PC for half of what a Mac will cost, but you’ll get half the computer.  Apple doesn’t offer a cut rate Mac.  There is no Mac eMachine.

One of my biggest concerns was that I wouldn’t be able to transfer all of my files and pictures and music over to the new computer.  I was terrified I might have to email the last 15 years worth of collected junk to myself, one piece at a time.  I’m not going to lie.  It took me a while to find a solution.  There are all sorts of suggestions online about how to handle it all, most of it either over my head Mac-wise, or Rube Goldbergingly ridiculous.  There is an easier way.

First, let me tell you what I chose and why.  I bought the 15 inch MacBook Pro with the i5 chip and the smaller hard drive.  It’s the cheapest of the Pro models, but I paid an extra $150 for the anti-gloss high-resolution screen (it’s gaw-jus) and got the Home and Student Edition of Office for Mac preinstalled for another $120 or so.  I picked the 15-inch instead of the 17 because a 17-inch laptop doesn’t feel portable to me.  In my mind, anything with a 17-inch monitor is a desktop.  I added Office because I’m old and set in my ways and don’t want to convert everything I’ve ever written into another file format and risk losing it to the data demons.  I paid the premium for the hi-res screen because I’m a guy and a video snob and I like high definition.  And I decided on the smaller hard drive (and the i5 chip which is standard with the smaller drive) only because I already have so much storage space available to me.  I have thumb drives, a big ol’ portable hard drive, a couple-a-three game systems and a PC that will probably work just fine as storage space once I take all of the crap off of it that was slowing it down; you know, like the browser and the virus protection.  Also, storage is cheap and getting cheaper all the time.  If I do end up needing more, it will only be less expensive later.

Ok, back to my transfer solution.  After I signed up for Mobile Me (I’m not explaining that, check it out if you like) read a few hundred message board posts and yelled at my dog for a while I decided to try some stuff myself.  What the hell, right?  I used to be pretty good at this.

At first, I thought my iPhone might be the solution. But it turns out that OS X and the iPhone OS don’t really get along that well.  I couldn’t even get my iPhone pictures to download into iPhoto properly, never mind transferring my entire iTunes library.  No, the answer was that portable HDD I mentioned earlier.  On a whim, I took everything I wanted moved from my PC… all my songs, my files, my pics and videos, even those pesky iPhone photos… and slapped it on the HDD.  I unplugged the USB cable from the PC, plugged it into the Mac, grabbed everything I’d just stuck on there and put it straight on the Mac desktop.  I didn’t convert anything.   I didn’t have to partition my hard drive and install Windows.  I didn’t even have to download any software to help with the transfer.  Everything opened right up and worked (though I did have to download a video codec or two play some of the movies).  I told iTunes to search the desktop and it rebuilt my iTunes library, even the ringtones.  I told iPhoto to do the same thing and it snagged everything, even the pictures it had refused to take straight from my iPhone.  After everything was in its place I deleted the files from the desktop (the other software had made its own copies) and it was like I’d had a Mac forever.

I don’t know if your portable HDD (if you have a portable HDD) will do this.  It is possible mine is magical or possessed or something.  It isn’t a fancy piece of equipment.  I bought it on the cheap at Best Buy, and not recently.  But it worked for me and for that I am grateful.

Now I can really focus on becoming a Mac snob.  I look forward to telling you 18 months from now how my Mac hasn’t slowed down a bit since I took it out of the box, that I’ve never had a virus, that my ponytail is shinier than yours, and whatever else it is that we Mac people say to make all of you PC types feel so inferior.

Did I tell you that I pushed a button earlier and some guy popped onto the screen, smiled and started giving me a guitar lesson?  That was pretty cool.