PC by day, Mac by night?

[Greg R Bradley]

Macs work great with 4Gb for anything up to using Photoshop to edit 100Mb files.

For home use a Mac with i3 and 4Gb is easily equal to a consumer PC with i5 and 8Gb.

[Jerome Stanek]

3 of my friends do just the opposite they use high end apples at work and high end pcs at home. one had his pc in to try and the pc worked better and faster then the apples

[Brian Ashton]

I use a PC 8-10 hours a day at work, mostly in a docking station with dual 24" displays and a full keyboard. My home laptop is waiting for Dell to visit for second time in two weeks and I've been wanting to get something slimmer for a while anyway so that might be a sign now is the time. I've kind of narrowed it down to a Dell XPS13 with touch, a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, or a MacBook Air. The Dell gets great reviews but on my list gets dinged for the poor service on the current machine, though long term I've had good luck with them. The Surface the huge pro is tablet mode and the pen, but gets dinged on my list for its keyboard and the kickstand configuration which some reviewers say makes it less desirable as a lap-top laptop and I use it in a recliner quite a bit. The MacBook of course is a whole different ecosystem, plus the comparable machine to the other two only has 4GB of ram and no touch screen. The pro of course is the legendary service. It seems like the other Ultrabook options are not i5's which is why I've pretty much focused on these three options.

My primary uses will be web browsing (Google Chrome either way) and Microsoft Office (mainly OneNote and Excel) which used to be a ding for the Mac but Office 2016 is now out for Office 365 subscribers for the Mac and seems to get good reviews. OneDrive would be my cloud service of choice since I have 1TB of storage there with my Office 365 subscription.

So question for those that switch between PC and Mac--do you find it frustrating to change OS's day and night? Changing my Day OS isn't even remotely an option before anyone mentions that.

Ive got a macbook thats running yosimate and running xp, 7 and 10 (and was briefly runnjng 8 but it sucked badly, even more than mac's mountain lion) in a virtual envr and i dont find any problems switching between all of them mutiple times a day. Office for mac still sucks so i go with win10 and office there. Still have office 2007 running in xp and seven. Since installing win 10 i can see the end of xp and most likely 7 reasonably soon.

It all depends on your mental flexability. I know a few who cant switch. They get hung up on, what i consider, the minor diffs between mac and windows. To me both are essentially the same just slightly diff arrangements, though i think office for mac sucks by comparison.

Before you buy a mac you need to take a long hard look at the new ones. For me their new confiģ is a deal breaker. Theres only one port for everything, including power. Ill be most likely going dell next.

So to sum up YMMV.

[Shawn Pixley]

For years I used a Wintel machine at work (required) and a Mac at home. I can make both work. General comments: the PC's required much more maintenance. They were much less reliable (crashing multiple times per day) and never lasted long (2 years?). There were many more options of software outside of some specialty software (graphics, scientific, some specialty math). Our IS department customized some internal services to be specific on our operating system and on our network services. This limited choices of machines, software, etc...

My Mac at home was more reliable and easier to use. There were fewer software options (especially games and controller / interface). The Mac's lasted longer and required much less maintenance but they are difficult internally modify. They weren't allowed on my company's network until recently.

Now I have a Mac at work. I need to run Parallels and our PC common environment to access some central programs and web services (cusomized to not work open browser-?????).

Bottom line: either way works. Me, I prefer Macs as I like the intuitive nature and elegant simplicity. I do not write code nor modify software. I have a staff member who is my genius in executing the queries when anayzing our database (120+M data elements and ever growing, refreshed daily, and weekly "snapshots" for historical / statistical analysis - large data sets but not huge). The data is too big to on a PC or be examined by Excel. He works on a PC, I work on my Mac. Both of us are happy. However, I think my data example is outside the common experience.

[Shawn Pixley]

Ive got a macbook thats running yosimate and running xp, 7 and 10 (and was briefly runnjng 8 but it sucked badly, even more than mac's mountain lion) in a virtual envr and i dont find any problems switching between all of them mutiple times a day. Office for mac still sucks so i go with win10 and office there. Still have office 2007 running in xp and seven. Since installing win 10 i can see the end of xp and most likely 7 reasonably soon.

It all depends on your mental flexability. I know a few who cant switch. They get hung up on, what i consider, the minor diffs between mac and windows. To me both are essentially the same just slightly diff arrangements, though i think office for mac sucks by comparison.

Before you buy a mac you need to take a long hard look at the new ones. For me their new confiģ is a deal breaker. Theres only one port for everything, including power. Ill be most likely going dell next.

So to sum up YMMV.

The single port will not be overly challenging. It really simplifies docking / monitors on my Mac Air.

[Brian Ashton]

The single port will not be overly challenging. It really simplifies docking / monitors on my Mac Air.

Challenging isn't an issue but having to replace all my other hardware to suite them isn't something I'm prepared to do simply because apple thinks they're right and all their minions must follow without question. In the past there has always been a way of circumventing their imposing ways but that seems to be coming to an end with the new macbook, or more likely too much of a hassle. I don't think you're even allowed to crack it open for any reason. My present mac is black listed (not exaggerating). The apple pee-on recorded the serial number and said it couldn't be worked on by apple ever again. What the unforgivable sin was, I took the battery out when it died.

[Shawn Pixley]

Challenging isn't an issue but having to replace all my other hardware to suite them isn't something I'm prepared to do simply because apple thinks they're right and all their minions must follow without question. In the past there has always been a way of circumventing their imposing ways but that seems to be coming to an end with the new macbook, or more likely too much of a hassle. I don't think you're even allowed to crack it open for any reason. My present mac is black listed (not exaggerating). The apple pee-on recorded the serial number and said it couldn't be worked on by apple ever again. What the unforgivable sin was, I took the battery out when it died.

I have a dock that connects through the Thunderbolt cable. On it, ethernet, two mointors, iphone / iPad sync cable, firewire and speaker phone. The keyboard, mouse and earphone are bluetooth.

[Bill George]

I have been on PC forever, and I am getting tired of this Windows 10 thing, I can handle deleting it and turning of automatic upgrades, but my poor wife is afraid IF she does not upgrade bad things will happen.

I have a used MacBook Pro coming, the mid 2010 model with a i7 processor plus new battery installed, and I will upgrade to 8 Gb RAM and maybe even to a SSD .

I do not want to run Parallels so is there a program equal to Corel X6 I can purchase? Will Adobe take Corel files or is there something cheaper or better for just designing for the laser and my 3D printer?

[William Adams]

A new vector graphics / Bézier curve drawing program for later versions of Mac OS X is Serif’s Affinity Designer, which is to some extent modeled after FreeHand: https://affinity.serif.com/

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

Things which I like when using Mac OS X

- Miller column file browser
- Sidebar
- Services
- drag-drop into file dialog boxes
- AppleScript
- Terminal.app
- control-key emacs text-editing shortcuts
- pervasive support for PDF
- opensource programs which use Apple’s programming environment such as TeXshop and Flexisheet

Things which I miss from Windows when using my Mac:

- active stylus on a tablet screen — one of these days I’ll have to break down and get a Wacom Cintiq
- better integration of X Window apps using Cygwin

I really wish Apple would improve XQuartz further and make a tablet machine (or that I’d win an auction for an Axiotron Modbook).

[Bill George]

I did find a product that Autodesk just purchased and re-named AutoCAD Graphic for the Mac.

http://graphic.autodesk.com/mac/

Has anyone heard of or used? I use Corel X6 all the time.

[Kent Adams]

Matt, I have a PC and 3 Macs. The Macs run windows better than the PC I have, which is a high end PC. Mac's retain their value very well. I recently sold a 2006 Macbook Pro for $600. New it was $1900. Try selling a PC that is 9 years old for a third of the new price

[Kent Adams]

Bill, if you need that program, you can run Windows natively on a Mac through the bootcamp program. However, Parallels is much better than it used to be and works great.

[roger wiegand]

I go back and forth all day long, have some Windows only programs that I run under VMWare on my Mac. Just bought my wife a new MacBook Pro so I can get out of the Windows desktop support business at home. Hate dealing with stuff like the current situation where Windows insists my copy is not legit and won't download any updates on one hand and in the system control panel says it is properly activated with the product key that came with the machine on the other.

I really have come to enjoy the painless integration across Mac, iPad and phone that Apple provides. All of my information is on all of my devices--particularly calendar, reminders, and text messages-- without any fuss or bother.

[Tom Stenzel]

Going from Windows to a Mac and back is a breeze. For years I was Windows by day, CP/M by night. You don't have a Wordstar 3.3 converter? How did you ever get by?

Real word processors use dot commands. Now that you mention it, no, I never did recover.

-Tom

[Mike Hollingsworth]

I spent some time speaking to my buddy's sister at his wedding yesterday. She works at IBM. That venerable company is turning to Macs as they've found like everyone else that expensive IT support is rarely needed for Macs. Times they are a changin'.