So Long PC
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006
Late last week I did something I’ve wanted to do for what seems like months on end - I bought a big, beautiful Mac. I’ve been a PC user since day one and have only had a Mac of my own for a short time while I was working for the Participatory Culture Foundation. Since the day I sent it back to MA, I’ve missed it dearly. My PC has been giving me so much grief lately, I couldn’t tolerate it any more and simply hopped in my car one morning at 10am when the Apple Store opened, and returned with a massive box containing my shiny, new 24″ iMac.
Needless to say, I couldn’t be happier with it. Not only did I get my hands on a Mac… I got the biggest one I possibly could! I was planning to get the 20″ iMac, but for an extra $300 I could go 4 inches bigger. I wasn’t stoked on going down an inch in screen real estate to begin with (my PC monitor is 21″), and for $300… well, it didn’t take me long to make my decision.
I’m pretty much fully operational already. I’m just waiting for my capture device to arrive (should be this week) and I’ll be ready to rid myself from the PC for good. I also have to pick up another gig of RAM as they didn’t have any in stock at the Apple Store. Photoshop CS2 is quite the hog and I’m not willing to use beta software for my day-to-day work, so I’ll have to get that extra stick some time soon. Luckily, they hooked me up with a voucher to get the RAM at the upgrade cost when they get some more in stock.
I puked in my mouth a little big when I fired up my site in Safari for the first time. Man, the text is HUGE and bold and ugly. I never really understood how people could refer to my design style as “web 2.0″, but now it sort of makes sense. Maybe the people that mentioned that were Mac users and thought the over-sized text was intentional. 
Not the case, and I’ve fixed things up a bit already. I’ve got some time off before I start my next project, so I’ll be sure to find a nice happy medium between the Mac browsers and Windows. I also noticed that the videos in Firefox /Mac are hidden. You can hear them, but not see the image. Not sure what’s up with that, but I’ll get it sorted out.
Anyway, it feels great being back in the cool kids club and I really can’t wait to get this PC out from under my desk.
43 people have had something to contribute so far.
Great choice! I’m going to be doing the same next month, then hopefully a 360 later in the year to fill the void of PC gaming.
Tried running Boot Camp at all yet?
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Yay for Macs. Do you have Connect360. I just got it yesterday! It’s pretty sweet if you have an Xbox. Have fun without your PC. I have to keep my PC at the moment because all I have is my old 17″ iMac G5…. oh well it works
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Your website looks perfectly fine in Safari & Firefox on my Mac. Here is a screenshot.
I haven’t opened it in Windows, but I doubt it looks that different. Maybe the text is indeed smaller, if that’s the case though, it would be too small for my likes.
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I too switched back to Mac a few months ago (last Mac I had was running OS 7). I haven’t regreted it since. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more switchers in the near future. Suggestion, get Parallels, as a web developer it’s a must have, especially when you want to test your pages on multiple browsers across multiple platforms on one machine.
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I’ve thought about switching to a Mac for quite some time now…hopefully soon.
Out of curiosity, what are you going to do with your PC?
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I think you bought it at the wrong time. Macworld is just around the corner and it’s been a while since Apple last upgraded their desktops, so you may have an outdated machine in a couple of weeks. See if you can return it or something.
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I have a 24″ widescreen Dell LCD already that I’m using with my PC (DVI) and 360 (VGA), so was thinking of getting a 15″ MacBook Pro sometime in 2007 and hooking it up to the Dell via DVI. Wanted a little more portability this time around rather than a desktop. Aperture 1.5 … here I come!
Forget bootcamp, Parallels is looking like a better alternative! OS X and Vista, the best of both worlds.
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Tight, I recently switched from PC to Mac not to long ago and got a MacBook and I absolutely love it and CS2 works amazig on it. Hope you enjoy.
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Welcome to the Mac world!
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Welcome to the family!
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Congratulations! You know what they say, once you go Mac…
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Totally brilliant. I have moved to mac for about a year despite being responsible for a PC network. I love them !
The elgato rocks btw. I have been runing eyeTV2 for sometime and love it - great recorder, conversion to any format is easy and if you have an ipod it is a marriage made in heaven it really it. You can also remove the tv ads effortlessly.
David
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I was plunged in to the world of Mac earlier this year, and I’ve not used my PC for personal use since. I switch between my Mac (at home) and PC (at work) quite often, although that can become confusing after a weekend of Mac shortcuts!
The only thing I miss is the gaming. I’ve got Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Fear and some other games I wanna play (I don’t do FPS on consoles, and only have a PS2 until the PS3 comes out (no heckles, please)). But the fact that my PC is missing an all important graphics card, I’m having to go without
I know what you mean about Photoshop, but hopefully it won’t be for too long, when the native Intel version is released it’ll be incredibly fast.
I have the Miglia TV Mini and it’s very impressive. But the one with USB and s-video looks brilliant, I want to upgrade, but there is little point.
Have you got all your programs sorted? This was my major ‘headache’ when first using my Mac, I didn’t want to install/uninstall a lot of programs. Here’s what I settled with:
Firefox, Textmate (a lot of people recommend BBEdit if you can afford it), Transmit (highly recommended FTP) and AdiumX (cross-protocol messenger program, amazing).
@ Mark, Pat: The new version of Parallels will work with a BootCamp install, which is just perfect as Parallels doesn’t support 3D rendering, whereas running Windows through BootCamp does… so you can use both (although, I’ve only briefly used Parallels myself).
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Taking the PC out of the picture is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while now. I feel as though my PC is just holding me back somehow. With all the time I spend trying to figure out what has hurt my registry, I could be working.
I’ve got a 24″ Samasung SyncMaster 244T. I plan on getting a Macbook Pro and using it as somewhat of a dock in the near future.
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Whoa, 14 comments over night. I’ll try not to miss anything…
Haven’t tried Boot Camp yet and I don’t see the need for it at this point. I’ve got Parallels running so I can test in Windows without having to restart, which is ideal. I’m not worried about gaming on PC any more as I haven’t since I got my Xbox 360 anyway, so Parallels should be sufficient for all my PC needs.
@Zachary: Yeah, hooking up Connect 360 was one of the first things I did. It actually works much better than Microsoft’s solution for Windows (Windows Connect or Media Player 11), which isn’t surprising but awesome none the less.
@Josue: It looks perfectly fine now. I changed most of the fonts and sizes already.
@J. Dakar: Not sure just yet. My wife’s PC is really old and she’s holding out for a Mac, but she seems to have interest in my PC all of the sudden. If I can get it running consistently, I’ll set her up with it or we’ll use it as a Media Center PC in the living room. Not sure yet.
@Rosano: Since Apple rolls out updates to their hardware every few months, there’s never really a wrong time to buy a Mac. Or rather, never a right time if you’re worried about being “outdated” instantly. Just the way it goes. I was going to wait for Leopard, but couldn’t deal with my PC any longer.
@trovster: Yeah, I’ve got things pretty much setup how I like. I’ve demo’d a fair amount of software and settled on the necessities. Maybe I should write a separate post about what I’m using and see if there’s something I’m missing. Anyway, I’m using most of the Apple native software like Mail, Address Book and soon to be switching from Google Calendar to iCal. Also using iPhoto with the Flickr Export plugin which is awesome. Firefox is my main browser (FF2 runs great on Mac!), AdiumX for IM, NewsFire for feeds, Transmit 3 for FTP, iTunes for music, VLC for video. And I think that’s it so far. I’m using Dreamweaver 8 for work at this point as any other solution involves breaking away from using one app for XHTML, CSS and uploading to 2 or 3. I’m pretty efficient with Dreamweaver.
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Hi Matt - I recently switched to Mac (bought myself the 17″ MacBookPro) - I freaking love it. I’m also running Parallels (to test in IE) - nice program. If you get a chance, try out TextMate for your editor (assuming you don’t rely much on Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG - I have an extra key, so hit me up if you want to give it a shot). The only thing I’m missing right now is a good screen capture product for the Mac - SnapzPro seems to be the industry leader for Mac, but I think it sux butt (no scrolling capture, limited edge effects) compared to SnagIt for the PC. Also, try adding Logitech’s NuLOOQ navigator to the mix - I just picked one up, OMFG does it rock - especially if you are dealing with Photoshop and Illustrator.
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Congratulations on this iMac, it´s a powerful and beautiful machine.
When you´ve got the EyeTV Hybrid please make a little review of it. I´m interested in this product to play with the Xbox in the Mac screen
Thanks and cheers!
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Congrats! I just bought my first Mac in November, a MacBook. I love it. I have found TextMate to be the best editor on the Mac. I got it as part of the MacHeist bundle and I love it. I was a Dreamweaver user on the PC. For FTP I am using Yummy http://FTP. There was a code on macappaday which dropped the price to $10 US. I tried Transmit for awhile and just was not all that impressed. On the PC I used FileZilla, which beta 3 is now crossplatform, but it’s just too ugly to use on my mac
I am currently trying on Photoshop CS3 and man it is so fast. CS2 was driving me nuts with how slow it is. Granted I only have 1GB of ram, but CS3 blows CS2 out of the water with it’s speed. The only big bug that annoys me in CS3 is that the brush outline doesn’t show up. You can run CS3 is Rosetta to fix that bug and it’s still faster than CS2.
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Hey Matt,
I was recommended to use NetNewsWire, as it syncs nicely with NewsGator online, so you can sync it to multiple machines (FeedDemon for Windows is brilliant, and uses the same system) in multiple locations. The perfect solution I thought between work and home, but I’ve stuck to Netvibes at the moment. Still it’s a good feed reader.
You mention dropping Google Calendar for iCal. I personally have synced my Google Calendar with iCal so I can sync it with my phone. Works great - except - you can’t change events in iCal and update to Google Calendar… but I’m waiting to try out a program which is supposed to solve this - Spanning Sync.
Flickr Export is ace. I’m running a pretty old version of it, which is free. I might just have to buy the new version, as it fixes all the things I moan about in the current version I have!
Paul Stamatiou has just written up ‘What Apps Did You Buy This Year?‘ which might be useful for you.
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Yay! I have 2 Macs myself and they are so great to work on. Good choice. That 24″ machine is a blast!
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@josue: your screenshot still looks the same to me. I’m using Win IE 7. You can hold crtl+mouse scroll up (bigger text) mouse scroll down (smaller text).
@all: And you know, we would have swithced on Mac a long time if it wasn’t so freakingly expensive . It’s like the price is 50%, 69% higher than IBM computers (and it’s brand new). You can’t even get Mac on surplus here in the Philippines! We stick to the economical and practical way to do.
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Welcome to back. I feel ready to comment you once more now you have a mac (joke)
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@Timothy, the price hasn’t been the biggest problem for me(I think the higher price is justified, nothing beats the Mac hardware), it’s mainly been the lack of gaming support.
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Well done on the switch! Congratulations
Just as a note, your site was never too big in Safari for me.. I’m on a MacBook, so maybe that’s why.. but the text sizes have always been quite normal.
Also, on the software front, get Textmate(macromates.com) and Quicksilver(quicksilver.blacktree.com).
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Not sure if you’d be interested, but I have an endless supply of Mac Apps that you might want to check out.
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…and now a note of caution, matt.
I bought a mac farm, consisting of 12 mac dual 1.25 g4’s with 22in(?) flat-panels.
I also purchased AppleCare software at $25, then realised that I had to pay for insurance as well, got frustrated, and decided to fly without the coverage. Bad idea.
As you might have guessed, they started dropping like flies after the first year. I went on to the Apple site to see whom could help.
MAC geeks are an oxymoron, having the same response to everything to fix a mac (push the button, reboot, use the disk, etc.). No luck.
When I explained that I did not get the AppleCare plan, I was called everything but a cheap bastard.
Fixing one would cost at least $230.00 assuming it’s the power supply.
osX is the greatest OS on the planet.
Having to pay for the hardware through the nose and not having the freedom to purchase my own, sucks.
Just a fair warning,
Greg
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On tuesday I’m getting a iMac G1 (old school I know) for free! As far as I know theres “something wrong with it”, but I havent set it all up yet to check it out very much. Can anyone tell me how much a used iMac G1 (fully working with OS X) goes for these days?
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I could never afford a Mac. I can’t even afford an iPod. How sad is that? (lol)
Anyways, this is my first comment since I’ve visited. I just want to say awesome job on the site. It looks great.
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In the words of Peter Griffin: “Freakin’ sweeeeet!”.
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Good move! I’m still with my old iMac G5 and I manage to do most of my InDesign, Photoshop and DVD Studio Pro tasks still fairly well….
But…I was at Futureshop the other day and saw that AMD 64 X2 running with a X1600 Pro 512Mb…and guess what…I bought the thing…for 699$! (couldn’t resist!)….
Arrived at home…installed Vista RC2 on my beautiful Gateway 21″ Widescreen and fell on my butt seeing the incredible rendition of Vista.
Flight Sim X is my new thing…
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Ahem
[Edit Previous Post]
G3*
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Congrats. However, I thought you didn’t “do” white computers. I’m sure you’ve heard of colorware. Although I don’t think it’s worth the dough to have a black computer, you might.
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nice one matt. i got rid of my pc as well. i’ve got a g4 powerbook that holds its own from place to place and i’m just saving for a g5 tower for my recording setup. life with a mac is a beautiful thing.
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I noticed this page after reading something else in this blog about widescreen LCDs, and while I am not trying to be the devil’s advocate here, I think that Macs are the most overrated pieces of crap to ever enter the world of personal computing. I think one particular exchange I had with a network technician once summed it up nicely: “Macs are just computers made for idiots.”
I suppose it’s also prudent to mention that I am not a Windows user (or M$ b***h or whatever you might want to call a Windows user) by default. I actually use a Linux machine for much of my work, and it fits the bill very nicely. Highly scalable OS + choice of hardware at non-exorbitant prices = best computer configuration ever.
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The reason some vids dont play is probably because they’re in win only formats… try downloading flip4mac or divx for mac.. worked for me, should be able to play and stream avi wmv files etc via quicktime in browser after that simple install.
All the best, welcome to the world of mac!
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I finally joined the revolution and ordered my 24″ iMac today!
2 GB RAM 256MB GForce 7600 GT
Wireless KB/Mouse & Apple Care
I can’t wait to finally dump my PC!
Braedel
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fuuuucker! i got my 20″ (the better one of the two) at the end of october and here you go and show me up. with the warranties and all that jazz the computer cost about 2600. sooo getting a 24″ didn’t seem like the right move unless i could live in it.
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Oooh dear. I left a comment on another one of your posts yesterday, saying how sad I was to have lost my mac. Reading this and I feel even worse now
I switched to mac about 2 1/2 years ago, after getting, just like you, very frustrated with my old PC. I thought macs were expensive, but everyone was telling me the benefits (they just work, basically), so I saved up a lot of money and got myself a second-hand powermac G4, the latest one with dual 1.42GHz CPU. It had 1.5GB RAM, and it was waaaaay faster than my old PC. Bonus: it performed as they all say, it just worked.
A couple of years and a few websites and learning done, my house got burgled last saturday and I am now back on my old PC for the time being. At first I was thinking “this isn’t too bad, windows is quite cool actually, wonder if I could get vista running smoothly”. Then it started being wnidows again. Error here, error there, need to update drivers, how the f&*@ do I install this bluetooth dongle, why does this not work, blah and blah and blah.
I miss my mac. I might even get an old G4 for the time being. Cos at least it will work. And however much I like playing the geek, I don’t like having to sort out my OS when I’m working. It’s a waste of time, therefore money, therefore a mac really isn’t that much more expensive than a PC
I miss my mac… Got a mac for me, anyone?
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Did you ever get the eyeTV hybrid? Does it work with Gears of War? How well?
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@Jason: I did get the EyeTV Hybrid. Have you see me post a video since I got my iMac? Heh, that should answer your question.
In short, it’s not good at all for capturing from an Xbox 360. In fact, it’s impossible if you’re only using the EyeTV software. There’s a second or so lag that makes the game unplayable while you’re recording. I’ve come up with another way to work around this problem, but it’s less than graceful and more trouble than it’s worth.
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Being some time now, since you made the switch, are you still satisfied? Or in other words have, you found anything annoying about the switch that one would like to know about?
Have been using PC from day one as well, but I can´t stop staring through the big display-window at my towns Mac-shop.
I´m using my computer for web programming 80-90% of the time, and have no ideas about what software I could get for Mac?
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[...] from my 24″ screen and had a good look at my iMac. It’s been just over a year since I made the switch, and I honestly couldn’t be happier that I took the plunge. But again, I had got myself into [...]
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Hey, thats fantastic. I was thinking about it for months and have recently purchased a MacBook to test the waters and was not dissapointed.
I will defineatly be buying a iMac next for my desktop replacement.
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