Calling all MacFiends

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I've been building my own PC's for years but I've always had this weird voice telling me to cross over to the dark side and to try a Mac. Now that I'm about ready to replace my laptop, I'm taking a serious look at the Macbook product line. Now that it's almost time to replace my phone, I'm taking a serious look at the iPhone 6 (Or possibly waiting for the 6s update?) Maybe even an Ipad Air 2 to jump in with both feet. I'm just in the mood for a change, to try out a different ecosystem...

The announcement of the New Macbook seemed like good timing, but its very underpowered so that leaves the Macbook Air or a Macbook Pro Retina (Leaning 13 inches) and learning towards the Macbook Pro for the display and the extra power, and the fact that I don't mind carrying around an extra pound or whatever it is. I'll still have my powerhouse desktop for anything very resource intensive, but it would be nice to be able to do some basic video editing and such on the go, so that's what is pushing me towards the Macbook Pro.

I'm just looking for some thoughts and opinions, especially from someone else who made the switch from PC to Mac... what should I expect? Is it a tough transition? What should I look forward to?
 
Well technically a Mac is a PC... - Anyways, It's night and day. Windows is like walking through a mile of glass to start getting to work, and then with Mac - it turns on and that's it your ready to work. It's a ton faster and easier. And it's full Unix, so you'll be able to run with the linux fanboys and out do them, cause yours is legit Unix, and their's not so much...

Macbook Pro, and don't skim on the ram. If at anytime shit breaks and it's Apple's fault, my motherboard fried, they gave me a newer model and transferred all my data for free. Basically they give great customer service, that in itself is worth the jump. Try calling up one of these Windows PC companies when there is something wrong... good luck with that shit...

And what the fuck are these viruses people using Windows talk about? Ya'll computers getting colds and flu? dafaq? Unix for life.
 
As a business tool the Mac OS X (Linus) is not only an amazing piece of hardware, the operating system is also very well integrated. I am able to run a 4 x 27” monitor set up on an iMac with 2 x 1T SSD drives with 32 GB of RAM and run not only the Mac but two instances of Windows 7 simultaneously.

Having all of the greatest creative, writing and communication software running alongside the SEO stuff: scrapers, posters, account builders, etc. saves me what amounts to weeks of time within every year simply because of the efficient workflows possible with the Mac. And so little jumping from machine to machine.

Moved all my companies and employees to Apple in 1997 with the first round of iMacs and Powerbooks, never looked back. Just over 100 computers and we have had only one true failure (outside of a glass of Scotch spilled on a laptop- long story) and it was picked up, repaired, and returned within 8 days and is still operational to this day.

On a Macbook Pro for the road and have flawless access to my files on the office network and can still control everything from afar including Windows Servers doing those special SEO things around the clock.

The iPads are even further ahead of other tablets regarding seamless operation. It does depend upon what your primary digital tasks are for sure. They definitely are no match for the Mac OS, but a nice light transition for writing, reading, and viewing. Also a very strong symbiotic relationship with all of the Apple line.

The iPhone 6 is probably the best piece of equipment I own. It can’t do what the Mac can, but damn, it’s pretty sweet. This coming from a guy that still knows Graffiti from the Palm Pilot III days… try and sync one of those fuckers with a Powerbook Wallstreet.

I suggest you get the iPhone 6 (or plus) and a MacBook Pro if a desktop model isn’t necessary. Admittedly, the iPad has become less of my day since the iPhone 6, so I only carry the two. But “Command Central” is fully equipped. Even at home with the older equipment it rocks.

Do it. The hardware lasts for years and years. It’s almost safe to say Apple will be around for awhile too. If you want to work not tinker with your computer all the time, Mac is for real. You can still tweak it for sure, but you once you dig in you will find the ergonomic efficiency and the smooth workflow will be hard to give up.

If you or anyone has specific Mac Application questions, there is a good chance we have crossed that bridge and solved it, so ask away…
 
meh...

as for support - your mileage may vary. There are many scary non-support Apple stories abound.
In Switzerland (where I hail from). Apple support is notoriously bad.
That means "Lie in your face about everything" - bad.

Loved my iPhone, but jumped that incarcerated life when the 5 came about and switched to an Android.

The iPad however - blows every other tablet out of the water.

::emp::
 
One of the things that's kept me on PC and Android is the ability to customize, or tinker, but... then I realized I never do any of that, everything is still stock/default.

Thanks for the input so far everyone!
 
I love to tinker too. I started tinkering on old Digital Equipment PDP-8's on from there...
Once I finally got busy and wanted to get shit done I realized the distraction of playing with computers was not putting any real value on my time. It was a psychological shift that changed my life in a big way for the better...

Haven't played video games since Space Invaders & Asteroids either :surprised:
 
There actually is a ton of customization possible, yall just have to know the unix commands and Google is one click away. When i first got my Mac I thought the same thing about customization, then I was running my screen saver as my background with a quick hack. Not difficult. Plus also it comes pre-installed with apache, mysql, perl, and the whole shebang, so you can testing stuff locally if you are a real geek.

As for support, yeah I guess outside the USA and Canada might be bad, but within murica they really don't mess around.

Honestly it's more productive than you would imagine you could be until after you make the switch - you will realize how useless Windows is, and if you really want, you can run windows on it too, seamlessly. There is a reason almost no one goes back from a Mac once they experience how much easier it is, and I was a hardcore Mac hater for years. Then they went full unix, and I decide to given them a chance.
 
Once you go Mac, you never go back? lol

I have a Q... performance wise, my impression of Mac was that you're paying more for lower specs. I promise I'm not about to drop a traffic leak link to my PC blog, genuinely curious what's up with that... I'd imagine maybe that Mac can do more with less?
 
What the f*** are you talking about? Mac has alway the highest specs in the industry. They were the first to bring SSD harddrives to market with Air, first with the mouse. I had 8GB of ram while no other windows laptop had more than 2GB. Your trolling bro...
 
That argument of PC's having more power than Mac's usually comes from the Gaming community as far as I've seen, involving the GPU's. The Mac GPU's slay it on processing and rendering music, video editing, and things like that, but not necessarily at high frame rate gaming or whatever. I don't know a lot about how it all works, but I know that the GPU's in the new Mac Pro (yes, plural by default) can even share some of the workload of the CPU's if needed (if 4 cores doesn't cut it, you can go up to 12 for the hefty work like special effects work for your hollywood movie) and even daisy chain the Mac Pro's.

Hell, I saw a video the other day of one single Mac Mini with about 8 peripherals coming off of it and most of those daisy chained, up to like 20 things, and it was running them all fine. Harddrives, monitors, and some other stuff. The Mac Mini does deal with some heat issues if you try to game with it. But Mac's have never been about gaming.

I personally don't give a damn about PC power. I'd take lesser power to never have to deal with Windows and Viruses. But I've never felt like I have taken lesser. My 2006 Mac Pro still flies on everything and works fine. It's getting aged to the point where the software isn't supporting the old hardware like the Power PC chip. But the hardware is still flying. Every PC I've ever had always had power management units frying, fans stopping, harddrives crapping out.

I've heard about Boxx recently with their new marketing campaign. Seems killer, you could look into them.
 
Now the first to introduce USB-C, not to mention cut the cord on parallel and serial ports lol. They spend R & D dollars on moving the digital world forward, not making the specs look good- it is about function and form and that equals productivity.
What the fuck good is horsepower when the suspension is sloppy, the gear ratio sucks, and it's a lemon?
 
@Ryuzaki I have a few of those Mac Pro G5's stacked with drives used as backup units and other than a power outage they have been running for almost 4 years straight.
Heavy bastards- when they retire I'm gonna build a bunker out of 'em :smile:
 
@Ryuzaki I have a few of those Mac Pro G5's stacked with drives used as backup units and other than a power outage they have been running for almost 4 years straight.
Heavy bastards- when they retire I'm gonna build a bunker out of 'em :smile:

I've knocked mine over in the past and been like "nooo my precious Mac Pro is gonna get dinged!" and then pick it up and find zero evidence it was ever dropped, and then see the desk leg that it scraped against when falling and it ate like 2 inches out of the wood. Those things are definitely tanks. The old ones are awesome with four hard drive slots, two graphic card slots, all kinds of PCI extensions, etc.

Thinking about all of this made me remember the old school iMac's that were made out of giant cathrode ray tube monitors lol. Craziness how far it's all come, Apple or not.
 
Craziness how far it's all come, Apple or not.
No doubt. I outfitted a company with eMacs, those babys were like 70 lbs,. Though about repurposing as boat anchors.

Grew up near DEC and Wang computer companies- scavenged junk (they encouraged it) and actually had a card reader and though that was the shit.

2015 makes Star Trek look like the 1950's...
 
ITT: apple fanboys being apple fanboys...yawn

Dell began shipping ultra-portable laptops with SanDisk SSDs on April 26, 2007.[185]Asusreleased the Eee PCsubnotebook on October 16, 2007, with 2, 4 or 8 gigabytes of flash memory.[186] On January 31, 2008, Apple released the MacBook Air, a thin laptop with an optional 64 GB SSD. The Apple Store cost was $999 more for this option, as compared with that of an 80 GB 4200 RPM hard disk drive.[187] Another option, the LenovoThinkPad X300 with a 64 gigabyte SSD, was announced by Lenovo in February 2008.[188] On August 26, 2008, Lenovo released ThinkPad X301 with 128 GB SSD option which adds approximately $200 US.[189]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Commercialization

::emp::
 
No one pays attention to those company, let's be real - there is a reason.
 
Everyone shipping SSD's before didn't supply enough storage to even put an operating system on there and still have any space for your file storage. They might as well have not shipped them.
 
Meh.. it is a computer.

MS-Dos, BeOS, Unix, Linux, AmigaOS, OS/2, MacOS, Windows 3.2,XP,95,NT, Vista, 7...

I have used them all and yeah..it's a computer.

As the technology matured enough to be offered in the consumer space, all companies started to offer SSDs.. pretty much at the same time.
And yeah.. that Dell shipped with 32GB.. which was ample space for the OS.

A bunch of marketers falling for the Apple reality distortion is funny in its own right, tho.

::emp::
 
Mac OS X = Unix. Mac OS X allows you to run Windows, literally 3 operating systems in one package if you want, a beautiful packages with great marketing and a brand people would die for. That's literally a marketer's wet dream.

I can't comprehend why so many marketers hate good marketing and great branding, that literally makes no sense - cause it automatically negates your own career choice. If you can't appreciate great marketing, great branding, excellent customer service, and great hardware marriage with great software - something almost anyone in business would strive for, especially a marketer - to be the top of your field and command any price for your products, then what do you as a marketer striving for?

Marketer who hate marketing - that in itself makes no sense.
 
Used to love my G4 ibm power pc processing. Infact I still have it living at my parents across the world. When i go there, turn it on, it chimes and *blink* its on fast as the first day I got it.
 
@CCarter
Ditto what he says.
No shame in being a fan of great marketing attached to a great product and experience... they reflect my own goals.
 
I didn't even hate on neither Mac hardware nor apple marketing.

But mac fanboys... geezes .. the only thing I said was
"it is just a computer"
and
"no, they were not first"

And you are all butthurt.

::emp::
 
Anyways...

I grabbed an iPhone 6 today and I love it after being an Android person for years. There's just a certain.. something.. about it that I never picked up on when I would compare phones on paper. Feels a lot less cluttered. Hoping that translates over to the Macbook as well.

So they recently refreshed the 13 inch Macbook Pro... the 15 is waiting on a refresh because of delays in the processor or something. And there's the New Macbook. And the Macbook air.

So... New Macbook is out because I don't like how it only has one port and I would need to carry around adaptors to use an input and to have it charging at the same time.

That leaves the 13 inch and 15 inch Macbook Pros and the 13 inch Macbook air to choose between. I looked at the 13 inch MBP and the 13 inch MBA today. The air is so slick, but my concern is just power. Can a Macbook Air handle basic photoshop stuff? I think as long as it can do that, it'll be good enough to allow me to work remotely and the fact that it's light and tiny is a big plus.

Other option is to wait for the refresh of the MBP 15 inch in a few months...

Just looking for some feedback from people with experience, what types of programs you've been able to run, so on and so forth... If the difference between Android and iOS is similar to the difference between Windows and OSX I feel like I'm in for a treat.
 
I grabbed an iPhone 6 today and I love it after being an Android person for years. There's just a certain.. something.. about it that I never picked up on when I would compare phones on paper. Feels a lot less cluttered. Hoping that translates over to the Macbook as well.

Ah, the majesty of iOS. Yes, it translates over to OSX!

The air is so slick, but my concern is just power. Can a Macbook Air handle basic photoshop stuff? I think as long as it can do that, it'll be good enough to allow me to work remotely and the fact that it's light and tiny is a big plus.

I have an Air, and on paper it's about 5-10x better than my old Mac Pro desktop, which handles everything fine. I've not put the Air completely through the ringer yet, but it never has hit any snag when I've put it up against things like Diablo 3, Netflix, etc. The only time I've notice it get hot like most laptops will tend to do is when pushing it to the limit with Diablo 3. I've also been in situations where I've gone to a coffee shop to do my work for the day and the Air was far more than capable.
 
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