I Switched

Friday 8 Apr 2005

If you've been reading between the lines over the last few years, you've realized that I've slowly been shifting my computing preferences from PCs to Macs. It began at CNN, when I had to use both on a daily basis, and shuffle my workload depending on which computer and OS was better for which tasks. When OSX was released, I decided that it was simply a better operating system for me and what I do.

I'm a sucker for Apple's innovations, which they always seem to be the first to come up with: widescreen laptops, slot-loading CD/DVD drives, all-in-one optical drives, portable music players and the software to power them, sleek metal laptops. I realize that any sort of laptop would suffice for my writing, but I long ago went with Apple (and more recently, upgraded to a 15" aluminum Powerbook) and I'm quite happy.

And now I've pulled it off at work, too. A brand-new G5 Powermac is sitting under my desk. I felt obligated to share my "switch" story, which of course did not go 100% smoothly. Here are the functions I had to convert, and how each fared:

• email - converted from PC Eudora to Mac Mail - went fine except I have to learn the secrets of IMAP in order to get 4+ years of old email folders moved from the PC to the Mac...still in progress
• web - Apple's own browser (Safari) is at least the equal of IE, and just in case, Apple puts IE on its computers as well
• telnet/ssh/ftp/scp - these come built into OSX, which is nice
• MS Office - they make a version for OSX, my biggest delay with this was that our software distribution center took 3 days to get me my CDs
• calendar - downloaded the Mac OSX version, piece of cake
• IM - I can't find my password and AOL/IM won't send it to me or answer my emails, so I had to shift to one of my other IM accounts
• hardware issues - my old flat-panel monitor (from Dell) worked just fine; I haven't yet dealt with the subwoofer and speakers, probably because I'm not one of those people who has the need to blast music etc. from my computer while at work
• helpdesk software - there is no Remedy client for OSX, so I'm stuck using a Java web application which is inferior