Thinking of switching to Apple

I'm convinced that Apple is a better way to go but I have a couple of concerns.

Tasks:
I use a Win Mobile type phone and an iPhone is just not an option for now. I've heard about using Missing Sync but I was wondering about how it handles ToDo's. Does it sync the ToDo's (Tasks) with iCal? Does it sync the priorities of the ToDo's? Also can you display ToDo's separately from the calendar using the native software?

Quicken:
I've heard there are a few ways to run Windows applications on the Mac. Does Quicken work well under Parallels or VMWare without doing the dual boot option? Is it still true that Quicken for Apple is not as good?

 

@Curious - It seems as if you have a few doubts. The best thing to do would be to go to an apple store and test it out yourself if they have quicken and other apps. If not, see if you have a friend that has a mac and test his out.

Personally I cannot speak about whether you should switch or not since I do not have one. I have used them before though and the only reason to switch for me would be to take my video editing to the next level (Final Cut since the pro. industry uses it).

The great thing about apple is that you can install windows on it using boot camp so you can always go back to your windows only apps if you need to.

 

Why are you convinced a Mac is a better way to go? I personally find OS X to be different, but necessarily better or worse.

 

If you're curious about switching to Apple, you can always get a copy of VMWare and then run the phone syncing software and Quicken. They should run just fine (pretty much anything about games I've been told)

I made a similar switch one week ago and it has truly been fantastic.

 

For one business people are, including me:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2008/tc20080410_206881.htm

 

i doubt we'll see apple taking over the corporate world

but i'll gladly be the trendsetter if apple would like to provide me with a free iphone and service I've already got the mbp to pair it with!

 

I stopped in the Apple store the other day. I was picking something up for my wife. While I was waiting, I asked one of the geniuses if they could help me with a nagging problem. I've been trying to move all my spreadsheet activity over to Numbers but have struggled a bit. I mentioned that at work, we use spreadsheets that are sometimes tens of thousands of rows and hundreds of columns wide. Many cells have paragraphs of information.

I quickly brought up Numbers and typed a long phrase then started looking for a way to make it word wrap in the cell. One of the geniuses ran to the back to ask about this and while he was gone, I brought up Office 2008 and entered the same string in excel and right-click, format, cell, word-wrap I was done. While we were waiting, I mentioned that these kind of issues stand in the way of corporate adoption of Mac as a platform. Corporate users are using them at home but have this misconception that Apple can't or won't work in a business setting. The genius came back and brought up the inspector. There it was. Word warp was there in the inspector. I've been using Mac for some time now but forgot all about the inspector. So there was a way to handle this issue, I just didn't find it when I went looking.

I shop at a local computer store that sells a lot of used pc's that are lease turn-ins. They have dozens of Dells. Dozens of HP's and even a few Macs. I asked if the Macs were lease turn-ins. I was surprised to hear the answer was yes!

So there is gradual but growing acceptance of Mac in a corporate environment. I believe Mac is better suited to the corporate environment than windows. Why? It just works. Countless thousands of hours are wasted in corporate america every day staring at an hourglass or calling the help desk because something broke. Fix something once and it stays fixed. If all that time was added up, most companies could afford to give all their employees new macs for home AND office use.

 

While we are talking about using a Mac in a corporate environment, the more I read, the more it seems like Apple is not very good at handling Task management. I like to keep a lot of tasks synced between my phone and computer and be able to prioritize, sort, filter them, chose what displays and what doesn't, set reoccurring tasks, use boiler plates, etc. This is a typical need in a corporate environment and I'm not sure Apple is up to the Task.

 

true but if you already have the software with the phone and it works well on a pc, just run it under vmware fusion

 

Yes I guess I could but if I have to use Microsoft's ActiveSync, to sync to MS Outlook under VMWare and then load MS Quicken too, I'm not too far away from wondering what I'm doing using a Mac at all, not to mention MS Office.

 

Steer clear of activestink. Missing Sync is a way around this issue (from what I've heard). If you're not sure don't do it. Do it when you're ready. I tiptoed around the edge of getting a mac for years. 3 years ago I picked up a mini and loved it. I kept worrying about leaving all my MS programs behind so I dragged my feet for 3 long years before going over totally to Mac.

Now that I have, I'm sorry I waited so long.

But my priorities might be somewhat different than yours. I'm a long time Linux user so I'm very comfortable with the OS X command line. I'm loving every minute of it and the only reason I might put windows 2000 on this thing is to tinker. I'm very reluctant to allow any M$ stuff on this thing at all. It's not bigotry against M$, it's just a preference. Perhaps it is in part because I want a clean break. So even if 2k (not xp, not vista) winds up on here, you can bet I won't keep any "real" data in the windows partition.

Hehe. Almost forgot. Welcome to NBR, CC!

 

Thanks r0k, it's nice being a newbie somewhere.

I agree with you in a sense, I'd like to make a clean break if I do it but I do find I'm very task centric in my needs and having a PPC phone doesn't help either. I actually liked the Palm way of handling tasks better than MS and it seems like the iPhone skips it over completely.

 

I do not know about today, but about 5 years ago i got a samsung i330 pda phone and was shocked to find out that it would not sync with my then everyday laptop, a powerbook g4 800. I was about to return the phone within the 2 week period, (something i did not want to do) when I discovered missing sync as a latch ditch effort. It worked flawlessly for over two years and provided complete compatibility on a phone that neither samsung nor apple nor palm supported.

btw, i still have the phone 3 years after the g4 powerbook gave up, its an antique.

 

MissingSync may work, but I would not personally depend on it. You may be better off dual booting with Windows for all the Windows-only things. Even for me, I can't get completely away from Windows, but when I can I prefer using Mac OS X.

Welcome to NBR!

 

Well I have been using Activesync with Vista and WM6 on my phone. Works great with MS Outlook. Makes me wonder why I would ever switch over to a Mac. Things work there, but there is not much to work with.

People learning to use a computer is like riding a bicycle. Mac still hasn't taken off the training wheels. That is why I would never switch to it. I would not recommend it to a buisness user especially, but whatever, everyone has their own tastes.

 

I had a windows mobile pda briefly. It felt familiar after so many years of using windows but I prefer the simpler and somewhat more limiting environment of Palmos. You mention training wheels. I suppose that's true to some extent. Throughout the OS, almost nothing is more than 3 clicks away. Those kind of training wheels are ok with me because a computer is supposed to help me get my work done, not increase the work I have to do. I call it good gui design and while there are every time it feels limiting, there are thousands of times it feels liberating.

When I run ruby on rails and php on the apache server that shipped with the OS my macbook, using the same technology that powers 90% of the web, controlling things from the unix command line if I want to, it's hard for me to feel like I'm restricted by some sort of training wheels.

So there's a different philosophy at work here. It's not about what's cool. No soap bubbles. No 15,000 choices when 3 well chosen choices will do. Perhaps a mechanical analogy will help at this point... When I want to take out the wrenches and check the tension on the timing belt, the tools I have aren't broken and I don't discover that the belt tension changed all by itself since the last time I took a peek.

Apple really should make a new commercial. The windows guy should be seen juggling about 350 billion tennis balls. The mac guy 3. A user walks up and asks the windows guy to do something but he has his hands full. The mac guy says no problem and does the job in seconds. The windows guy is still concentrating on keeping his 350 billion balls in the air. When you consider that win 7 will try to get the kernel size back down to something in the tens of meg from the 4 gig it is today, you know something is wrong on the windows side of the world. To me, the best thing that could possibly happen (for us, the end user) is if M$ layered windows as a gui on top of some flavor of unix like OSX did.

So there is some truth to the assertion that in some areas Mac has "training wheels" but this is not necessarily a bad thing at all. There are those who want the complexity and confusion of windows so they can tweak absolutely everything absolutely all the time and they will sympathise with the "training wheels" claim. Then there are those (and I'm one of them) who are very happy to allow a software engineer with some good sense to weed out those choices so they don't occupy so much of my time. I haven't clicked "are you sure" in a long time and I'm not in a hurry to click it any time soon.

hope this helps...

 

well said r0k. I just got my macbook a few days ago and i'm loving it. Everything is so simple, if you need to find something you will find it quickly even if you are just clicking around. But on a windows machine, you could be clicking around and not getting any closer to being able to change the setting that you want to change. When i was using leopard, there have been several times when i thought to myself "thats it? where are the rest of the settings?" But it turns out that the choices that they give you are all you really need. At first i got the toshiba for all my schoolwork, since i already have a desktop. But after using it for a while, too many things just didn't work. Since i have been hearing nothing but good news from the people that have recently made the switch from a pc to a mac, i decided to give it a shot and i don't regret it one bit. I have my gaming rig to play my games and mess around with, but i now have my macbook where everything "just works".

 

When is the last time you worked at a corporate help desk? The last time I did, it was from 1997-2001. As the company migrated from NT4 to Win2K and from Office 97 to Office 2000, our call volume dropped and eventually they axed 40% of the help desk staff (me included). That "broken hourglass crashed app" thing may still happen, but it happens FAR less frequently than it used to. But hey, as know the Apple OS of the time, OS..9.. was absolutely perfe(bomb)ct and nev(bomb)er crash(bomb)ed. That's why we still use it today. 8)

 

Windows
M$ made significant progress from NT4 to 2K. I'm pretty sure 2K was the OS I kept running on my machines the longest. I resisted XP for a long time because of "activation". I didn't want DRM for my desktop OS. Finally, I switched everything over to XP but I kept Windows Update turned off. One of the biggest battles fought against M$ was the ability to install from a ghost image in under 20 minutes versus a network install at 90 minutes plus. When M$ finally caved in and allowed some corporate clients to use install images, it was just before the "Windows Genuine" hassle started. Corporate users were sheltered from the biggest hassle since Windows ME. I was sheltered as well because I wouldn't let windows update run on my systems. There was some development going on in my area and with every minor OS update or compiler patch, our software would go down. Some of our software ran on Solaris and it never even hiccuped. It was the stuff that was running on NT that had to be babysat all the time.

Linux
During this same period, Linux was coming on strong and pushed various windows server OS out of the way and became accepted even in the corporate environment. Why? Always work. Never reboot. For those familiar with Solaris, Linux felt like home. Around February 1998, I shut down my last NT box and brought up a Linux box. I never ran a windows box as a server at home again. It ran unmolested for close to 10 years, only needing to reboot for the occasional power failure or hardware upgrade. Meanwhile, I still had a few windows boxes with 2K or 2K3 server. I always thought it was a shame the gui was pumping pixels around on a headless box. The presence of Linux in the telecommunication, banking, scientific, internet and other corporate environments speaks volumes about the desire for something which keeps working year in year out, even if the learning curve can be somewhat steep.

Apple
Meanwhile, on the Apple side of the world, OS 8 and OS 9 were viewed as "something for the artists". Finally OS X came along and IMHO the single largest step in Apple history was made. With BSD running underneath the gui, Apple brought the "never reboot" experience to OS X while preserving the "just works" experience they always had. This is the step Windows 7 may take. I have been reading that the Win 7 kernel may not even have a gui How *nix like to get the journaling file system up and running and all the networking services before bothering to draw pretty pictures for the end user. And this makes a heck of a lot of sense for a headless box.

Vista is the new Microchannel
That Windows has any remaining mind share in the corporate environment is a lot like the old days of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Remember the Microchannel debacle that spelled the beginning of the end of the IBM dominance on PC hardware? To me ME and now Vista are Microsoft's microchannel. If Vista were adopted in a corporate environment, help desk call volume would reach heights it has never seen and companies would find themselves doubling and tripling their call centers to keep up with the call volume. Whenever M$ puts out a bloated joke of an OS, especially when it is overpriced and encumbered with useless DRM, it pushes more users away. Good. A free market can work, even in the presence of a huge monopoly. Especially when that monopoly is its own worst enemy.

 

Blah blah. Way off-topic. Needless to say, you let a lot of FUD govern your beliefs about Windows. Oh well. I run Windows, even Vista, and have no real problems. Guess I'm special.

 

Vista is a huge step forward for windows, unfortunately it falls short in a few key areas. M$ is yet to take the step Apple took when they embraced *nix as the underlying OS. Windows 7 promises to finally bring to the PC side what Darwin brought to the Mac OS side. Time will tell. Meanwhile, a lot of people are switching. Whether it's FUD or a decision based on their needs, they switched.

The OP has some doubts about switching based on the need to keep a few windows apps around. Apple has artfully made it possible to "switch without completely switching" using boot camp or one of the available virtual machines.

@S.SubZero: I'm glad to hear you are having no problems on Vista. My reason for not going to Vista was not based on the belief that it would not work for me as I'm pretty good at getting Windows to do what I want it to do. My reason is personal preference. I was getting tired of the drivers/windows-update/virus-scan/hourglass game. Some of that is bound to leak over to Mac but for now at least we are free of that hooey. There's no need for me to defend my decision and I certainly require you (or anyone for that matter) to defend the use of Vista. To each his own. But there are fundamentally different ideologies at work here. There is simple/low TCO/limited versus complex/high TCO/unlimited. I pick the former but I don't claim to have the ability to pick for anybody else.