The Switch, Day 1 – One Man's Account on Switching to Apple

In a nutshell, this is a story about a "PC" user's journeys into the alleged Mecca of graphics designers and Hades of, er, everyone else; The Apple Macintosh. Now me - I'm not that easily brainwashed persuaded by the general opinion. I like to make my own conclusions, and if someone is going to shoot in anyones' feet, let it be my own with me behind the trigger.

I've never used a Mac before*). Then again, I've felt that Windows provided what I wanted - until about a year ago. Long story put short and personal beliefs and dodgy company policies aside, decent PC laptops don't come without a preinstalled Windows and Linux support for laptops is always a gamble, so it was time to look on the other side of the proverbial hedge. What I saw, was something white, flat and about 13" in diagonal.


...And no, this isn't a review. This is a journal.

*) Not exactly true. When I was a kid, I managed to break something in my uncle's Mac by playing with the trashcan. "Look at it! it expands when you drag stuff there, *clicky* and now it's thin again! Whee!". I blamed others. If persons concerned are reading this, I'm very sorry...

Day One: Hello, My Little Friend

Finally, after one and a half weeks of wait, It arrives. It felt like a damn long wait, but doesn't it always?

You know the buzz in your stomach when you have something new and exciting in your hands, but don't dare to open it, afraid to spoil the moment? I had that. I must've sat with the thing in my lap for five minutes, just staring at the whiteness of the case and blackness of the screen. Courage gathered, I finally got the power on.

Then it strikes me: I'm greeted by an operating system I honestly don't know how to operate. I have three new buttons on my keyboard, one button less on my mouse and something called "Finder" on the screen. Yikes. Mommy?

After the initial panic/despair subsided a bit, I found the Windows equvilent of the Control Panel (which is much straightforward than the Windows' counterpart, mind you) and not long before I had both tap-to-click and two-finger-tap-to-alternate-click enabled. I wonder why tap-to-click is disabled by default; it must be a Mac-thing.

I'm actually surprised of how fast I get the hang of things. Two-hours-or-so into mucking around and I already have grown accustomed to things. Take for instance installing software: You download your .dmg file, open it and you get usually prompted with a window and a message: "drag this icon to your Applications folder". Do that and, lo and behold, you have installed an application! Why hasn't anyone else thought of that outside the Mac playpen?! That method will perhaps bite itself in the behind somehow, once I've gotten a better hang of things and want to customize more. But why care? I'm too psyched for such trivialities.

Oh, I haven't told about the initial updating process yet. Ok, so I plugged the laptop to the network I was suddenly greeted by this update screen. There were 20-something updates available. So, we're all familiar with this on the Windows world - you install the OS in one hour or less and spend the rest of the day installing updates and drivers, booting every once in a while. Nope, not me, not this time. I pressed the "Download" button, it downloaded a few hundred megs of patches, installed them and quit. Yeah, no reboots, no nothing. I just resumed fooling around while it churned happily away in the background and I continued to fool around once the installation was complete. Yay, I say.

To be Continued in Day Two: Revelations

Article republished from post on metku.net with permission from Henrik Paul.

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Your Comments:

Congratulations! Your user experience just gets better as you learn more about the Mac. I suppose you've already set up two-finger scrolling?

 Neil Anderson
 08/21/2007  at  10:26 AM

It's a very bad idea to 'fool around' during the install process. I don't know why Apple even let you do this -- they clearly shouldn't, because there have been many issues with updates over the years that seem to have caused by people running applications and thus locking up resources that needed to be updated. (And you can't predict which resources will be needed -- an iMovie update can easily attempt to update your iPhoto resources.) Supposedly the resources should not get locked up but in practice this is not something you should rely on, because it hasn't proven true, despite claims.

This is why, if you search at any Mac advice website for help with Software Updates, the #1 thing they tell is to QUIT ALL APPLICATIONS FIRST and to NOT TOUCH THE COMPUTER DURING THE UPDATE. When users complain about updates breaking their systems that worked fine for other people, more often than not they did not follow that advice.

Please listen to this advice if you don't want to find yourself cursing the Mac and Apple after an update goes wrong for you.

 DBL
 08/21/2007  at  11:10 AM

Actually, you must know this, but the 'general opinion' is that you should use Windows. And that Mac is for nutters who worship the god AppleJobs.

If you went Mac, it was because you had the intelligence to go against the grain, the flow, the Lemming route, whatever...

The only brainwashing involved comes from Hades (Redmond..or Micropork to be blunt).

 Jon T
 08/21/2007  at  12:41 PM

I've always "fooled around" during updates. The updater will ask you to quit a running program it wants to update. The update also caches system resources updates and applies them on reboot so they can't be corrupted. That's why reboots after an update take a while. I've never had an update problem. Of course, being a 23 year Mac veteran I can usually fix anything that goes wrong. A more cautious approach could we wise for those new to the Mac.

The drag and drop install of applications is genius. That application is in reality a folder containing lots of other folders and files, sorta like the application folders in Windows. The contents of the Mac application is hidden to keep it all clean and prevent people from accidentally (or on purpose) from corrupting it. Because it is a folder copying a Mac application (folder) to Windows or Linux servers can be messy, thus the '.dmg' container files.

The Mac is a complex and interesting environment. Find yourself a website or book and dive right in.

 Robert R. Fox
 08/21/2007  at  01:19 PM

Believe it or not, Microsoft's Mac Business unit set the standard in installing simplicity. With Internet Explorer for Mac (version 5 ?), after downloading, one simply dragged IE to the Applications folder.

(however, internally it still did some fiddling.)

Congrats on your Mac

 Treehouse
 08/21/2007  at  03:43 PM

note that microsoft stopped supporting/developing IE for Mac in 2004.

the idea of dragging apps to the appropriate folder has been around for a while before IE, though

 roger
 08/21/2007  at  04:07 PM

I bought a Mac Mini last July to "see what Mac was all about" and have never looked back. This past April, I bought myself a MBP for my B'day. I am 100% Microsoft free after 24 years and will never go back. I am lovin' life!

 Pegasus
 08/21/2007  at  04:58 PM

We've always had the ability to simply copy the app to the appropriate folder. But only for simple apps that doesn't mess around with extensions etc. More complex installations like Adobe Photoshop used an installer (to this day they still need an installer, a buggy one at that). It was Microsoft's Office 2001 that pioneered drag and drop complex installation via their then much touted "self-healing" feature. I don't think Microsoft invented the approach. They were just the first to do so on a large scale and was at the time considered an example to be followed. Though that was on a real CD. The compressed .dmg approach was really invented by shareware authors wanting to emulate Office 2001 install method but distributing their wares via the internet instead of physical disk.

 slebetman
 08/21/2007  at  11:16 PM

Well, actually drag&drop;installation of (even the most complex) applications was pioneered by a relatively unknown British company called Acorn Computers and their RISC OS operating system. The first version was called Arthur and appeared in 1987, complete with a fully functional Dock, called the Iconbar. It even had very decent font anti-aliasing since about 1990 or so! Actually, a lot and I really do mean a lot, from OS X and NeXTSTEP came from RISC OS, which incidentally ran on computers equipped with Acorn's own CPU - the ARM processor.

 Adam
 08/23/2007  at  11:12 AM

Interestingly enough, many of these modern operating system features were popularized or invented (such as overlapping windows and draggable icons) by a smallish American company called Apple Computer who released the Apple Lisa in 1983 and the Bicycle (I mean Macintosh) in 1984.

Bot

 ex2bot
 08/24/2007  at  09:22 PM

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