What will I lose?
I have been reading this forum and several others for about three months. Now, as entertaing and informative as they are, it seems that majority of people are mostly interested in hardware rumors and their distain for windows or anything Microsoft. Granted, I enjoy that too, as I have been waiting for the elusive updates. I have to buy, updates are not. However, I now need to know what will I lose in switching to Mac. It seems to me that when questions arise as to compatibility problems, most posters like to glaze over and minimize the possible conflicts and turn to the positives of Mac OSX and or the attractiveness of the form factor. I agree Mac is better. I started with Mac when laser printers were $6000.00. I switched to windows around '96 because of incompatibility with the internet. I know most hardware problems can be overcome, but I have questions related to the web. Will I encounter web site page incompatibilily, download problems, Windows Media Player, RealOne or anything else? If so, will these problems be addressed in the near or immediate future. If not IE, what about Mozilla? Does this alleviate conflicts in web pages? Please, any information will be helpful. Thank you in advance.
Comments
Nope...and both WMP and RealOne are out for OSX.
"If not IE, what about Mozilla? Does this alleviate conflicts in web pages?"
I really don't ever get webpage conflicts, and I'm using Chimera, a very bleeding-edge betaware browser. You'll be fine.
Windows Media player and Real One player are also available for the Mac free of charge, although Media player on the Mac seems to support fewer codecs than its Windows counterpart, so viewing some video files may be a problem.
Some online banking services may also support Windows only, although this is easily remedied, by switching banks.
[ 10-29-2002: Message edited by: RodUK ]</p>
There are many 3rd party softwares out there that do make your Mac expereince much better.
VLC (Video Lan Cilent) is a must download to watch .avi files and VCDs.
As for others, you can go to versiontracker and find sotwares that u need.
I'm not a gamer, e.g., but I think that is one area where Mac is not up to par with Windows. Most of the big games are available for some console and PC. Mac? At best, you'll hear "we're working on it...". Mostly not that though.
On the other hand, there might be more unity among mac users (tiny yet powerful...), and there are plenty of ways to get nice software for your mac through lesser legal means (which, hey, is also important for most of us).
And of course, functionally, the difference is very little: there aren't any things I can think of that you can do with a PC which you can't with a mac (which I actually experienced while working on a final year project at the department of computer science at my old university: all PC fiends, gazing at my late Pismo, doing everything sans peine).
I think, for me, the biggest problem is the ignorance most people have with respect to macs. They readily assume that you will be able to open some .exe without a hassle (while you need a -virtual- PC for that kind of stuff). Moreover, I personally am a bit annoyed buy the lack of choice in the mac universe: You only have two or three families of desktop machines, and two families of portables, and that's it, and you better like it (and shell out enough for it). I know price whining is a controversial issue at these boards, so I won't engage in it, but still... I am just a tad annoyed.
about them. After using a pc for a year or so i found i many things just
wrong about the OS and the system itself. I even built a pc, and it still
was wrong, horribly wrong. I sold both my pc's and bought an ibook.
There just a more organic fell about mac's that i just love, and all the
things you can do on a pc, you can do better and with more style. MacOS
is the operating system for a sofisticated age, and if its just 5% so be it.
No pity for the majority......Think and Be Different!