Does this mean that I can run games on Windows side (am I even getting the concept right)? Is there a performance hit?
Those long-time Mac users who remember my vicious hateful rants when I first transitioned to The Light Side by going to Macintosh can attest to this- it’s hard sometimes. However, the system by very design and from the basement up is Integrated.
I started with an IBM PC 8088 with a full-height Winchester Drive.( 10 Megs I think, which was pretty hotsy totsy at the time ). The days of frantically remembering DOS code to make one bit work with another are long gone.
I think the sites folks have suggested are excellent. Take your time. Find someone who OWNS a Mac. They will, of course, be rabid Mac-Believers. ( I like to call us LightSiders, because trust me when I tell you that there is a lightness and ease of use in this OS that truly makes one happy. )
You will find that you can turn it on, do five things at once, have fun, work hard, and turn it off.
That’s what it is supposed to do, and instead of being the NORM to do battle with a machine, it’s peripherals and software interfaces, the NORM is just that. Turn on, work, play, turn off. Does it lock up ? Sure. Bullshit to anyone who claims a Macintosh cannot lock up. However, the basics of good machine and OS maintenance deal with that nicely.
My two cents? The day you buy a Macintosh, do not leave the store without buying a copy of Disk Warrior by Alsoft. Run it once a month. Life will be beautiful. 
Cartooniverse
Yup. In a virtualization environment, Windows has no ideas that it’s not on a virgin PC. The difference, though, is that there’s no accellerated video and games that require DirectX (3D shooters, probably lots of other games) won’t work due to the video. I think Parallels is working on video accelleration, though. Most of my old games work, though. Virtualization is great in that it runs on top of your Mac OS, and you don’t have to restart, and you can use them concurrently. If you need games, though, that require DirectX, you can use Boot Camp. It will partition your drive for you, and let you install Windows XP SP2 natively, i.e., at this point, your Macintosh is a Windows PC. At this point, you’re dual booting. I’ve not tried Boot Camp myself, as I don’t care to dual boot and all my good games are Mac native anyway.
My slow, 17", bottom of the line iMac is still faster running PowerPC code than my expensive, loaded, top of the line Power Mac G4. So, for me, the non-Intel code is still an upgrade to me. For the stuff that runs without Rosetta (the PowerPC translator), it flies. I’m on the road so only just got the iMac a few months ago, so the G4 is still in service. This iMac will be the Winbox replacement I mentioned earlier, and I see a 24" iMac in my future to replace the G4. It’ll also be off to Craigslist while it still has some recoverable value.
For external drives to share between Windows and Macs, beware that FAT32 has a 4GB Limit on file size. I just use HFS+ and try not to need Windows connectivity. My 1GB Shuffle is enough for most transportability needs. You could partition the external drive so have both HFS+ and FAT32 partitions, and I tried that for a while, but sometimes the CD images I want to put on the Windows partition are larger than 4GB, and FAT32 pukes.
I never touch Disk Warrior, but I know that people that need it give it high marks. HFS+ is journaled if you want, so that takes care of my needs.
Balthisar:
That would be Parallels you’re talking about. And you would be right about Parallels. (Parallels lets you run a Windows environment as a process within the larger MacOS X context).
But there is also native Windows. Boot Camp is a special loading process that lets XP (or Vista, so I’m told) be installed on an Intel Mac, and, once installed, you’re not running a virtualization environment at all. You’re running Windows. If the specific hardware of the Intel-based Mac is supported with appropriate Windows drivers, you get all the accelerations and whatnot that you’d get on any other kind of PC, and the Mac is, at that point, very definitely a PC.
Most serious gamers use Boot Camp and run Windows that way, not as a virtualization environment via Parallels.
Or so I’m told… my Mac is a G4, the last computer game I played was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, and I’ve never BootCamped or Paralleled, myself.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “flexible” in this case, but I disagree. As far as letting software take over, by which I think you mean full-screen and use their own gui skin, Macs allow that just as much as Windows does. The fact that most don’t do it is a testament to the elegance and usability of the Mac design in the first place.
And, at it’s heart, Mac OS is Unix, making it much more scriptable and flexible than Windows has ever been.
The old joke is that Unix makes the easy stuff hard, and the hard stuff possible, while Windows makes the easy stuff easy, and the hard stuff impossible. Mac makes the easy stuff pretty (and easy), and the hard stuff possible.
I switched about 3 years ago for my personal computing. I still use Windows and Linux at work (and still have a Windows media box at home). It takes some getting used to, but I like the Mac. Parallels is very well done, IMHO.
This makes no sense, especially considering that you can run Windows on a Mac now. A Mac is more flexible than a PC, because it gives you the ability to run both Windows and Mac OS. And Mac OS is inherently more flexible than Windows to begin with, partly because it’s based on Unix.
A Mac is a better tool than a PC, because it can do everything a PC can, and more.
It’s true that Apple pays more attention to aesthetics than PC manufacturers, but that’s a positive, not a negative. To anyone who says aesthetics don’t matter, let me pick the clothing you wear for your next job interview/date/whatever.
USB flash drives are normally formated for FAT, but can in fact be formatted for a number of different filesystems (although given that FAT is a de facto standard that can be read universally by Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX/Darwin OSs, you might as well leave it that way). The only reason you might want to reformat it is if you want to retain metadata on a filesystem that forks it, like HFS+ (which then won’t be readable by Windows).
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You should definitely consider going to a Mac. Did you hear about Ellen Feiss? She was writing a paper on the p.c. and…
Stranger
thanks for all of this input.
my work application will never run on a mac. it barely runs on windows. it will run, but not upload to the building hardware from windows xp. something in the communication protocols, i guess. i do not plan to shift many applications over. i am thinking of a fresh start in my non-work computing. i don’t do any gaming.
i am really looking forward to trying out all the stuff i have been hearing about
Well, you will certainly find that some mac users tend to be very committed to their platform, to the point of finding it necessary to go to extreme effort to find fault with the PC, and even make things up about what is “wrong” with windows.
Windows users (and microsoft for that matter) generally ignore the mac and just use the computer like any other tool or appliance, taking it for granted, like a phone or toothbrush.
Personally, I find the arrogance and sometimes fanatical devotion to the mac a bit of a turn off, so I tend to favor the pc when discussing them.
When it really comes down to it, they both have plusses and minuses, and are just machines. Use whichever one you feel most comfortable with, or as I said before, both if you can afford it. They are both all over the place and being proficient at both will always be to your advantage.
mrrealtime:
It dates back to a time when it was 110% true. We had a GUI, better apps, a mouse, and a hi-res screen when y’all were looking at green-on-black (or amber-on-black). And y’all were calling Macs “toys” and not at all acknowledging the superiority of the Mac, and it really was totally freaking superior.
If the MacOS and Windows just suddenly appeared out of nowhere yesterday, I doubt you’d see the attitudes. Just much milder personal preferences acknowledged as such.
Instead, there is history and a tendency to take it personal and hold grudges.
Me, I’ll readily admit to having said “PCs suck”, mostly back when they really did, but y’all have come a long ways. Windows95 was a giant step and XP another.
I still think the Mac is superior, but the gap is small enough that I tell folks that if they already know Windows well, are proficient in it, and are satisfied with it, that’s pretty much going to erase any advantages the Mac platform might have to offer them.
For myself, I’d rather use a decade-old 7100 running MacOS 8.6 than the latest fastest Windows PC, but that’s in large part because I know the Mac well, am proficient in it, and am deeply satisfied with it — and those aren’t characteristics of the Mac but of me.
What work application are you using?
Stranger
Flexible in what way?
I get your point but . . .
What lead to my earlier rant was my “straw that broke the camel’s back” experience with Windows. I was uprgrading something like Explorer or Outlook (I can’t exactly remember but it shouldn’t have been a big deal). The upgrade totally crashed the system. I’ll never know and don’t want to know why. At that point my friends and family did an intervention and heavily suggested that I get a Mac. I capitulated and my life has been better ever since.
I find that the defenders of Windows are the geeks who understand register files, the thousands of nooks and crannies in Windows, shortcuts and the other BS that people that want to use their computer don’t have the time or inclination to learn. I used to find that stuff a challenge. Now it is just a massive annoyance. I am so sick of the my laptop getting loaded up with crap that I never wanted or asked for. I travel with it and logging on to a WiFi network in a hotel seems to load it up with crap. Deleting a program never seems to really delete the program. Or, programs can load themselves in and you can’t find them to delete them unless you are a Windoes geek. This is the kind of nonsense has turned me off to Symantec (Norton) which I used to think produced a good product.
Anyway, that’s my rant for today. Life is too short to spend all of your time learning an operating system.
You’ve never had to write a complex batch script or deal with Microsoft’s crappily-defined, unreliable APIs, have you?
Even if you don’t have a need to get down into the low-level stuff, OSX offers a lot of interoperability between applications, both via the OO design of the Cocoa framework and the AppleScript automation script tools. And the Apple Human Interface Guidelines seem far more developed than anything Microsoft does or recommends to developers, resulting in a more consistant graphic interface paradigm among applications. Also, for Unix/Linux geeks, you can compile and run *nix applications for both the command line and X11 interface. (I wend to a Condor Week conference a few months ago and most of the developers–admittedly heavy with Linux and FreeBSD nerds–were almost exclusively carrying PowerBook laptops.)
For the average user who does word processing, sends e-mail, and browses the Internet, the difference between the two systems is minimal (though I find much more reliability in my PowerBook than the crappy Dell laptops we have at work); aside from a couple of different keys and the default Aqua skin versus XP, the typical user isn’t going to be seriously affected. As for particular applications (games, video editing, science/engineering solvers, whatever) the best platform to use is the one where your particular applications are best supported. For a developer or someone who uses scripting apps, Mac OS X is vastly superior and inarguably more flexible.
Stranger
Thats exactly the kind of indefensible sweeping statment made by a typical devotee. You prove my point.
All computers crash. All computers have their hard disks crash occasionally. There are confusing things about the Mac OS depending on your perspective.
Anyone who promises all your problems will be solved and you will enter a perfect utopia if you switch to a particular operating system is clearly … pardon the pun…bios-ed.
Cite?
I’ve written plenty of Windows batch files. Batch files are obviously very limited so if they’re likely to get complex I use a proper scripting language instead, plenty of which are available for Windows.
Not sure what you mean by Microsoft’s APIs being unreliable. If you’re making a point against closed source software, the point would apply just as well to Apple, surely?
I agree that having a widely-observed HIG is a good thing, and advantage for the Mac. I don’t see how that makes OSX more flexible, though. If anything, by imposing conditions on software developers it ought to hinder flexibility.
I recently, within the past two months, bought a MacBook (I had to sell my soul to my bank to get the, loan, of course…).
It’s been bliss. I grew up on PCs. We got our first PC when I was seven. I learned how to use DOS, and after that, Windows 3.11. I was amazed by Windows 95 and 98 before it, astounded at the speed of Windows 2000 pro, disgusted by the bugs in Windows ME, and just flat-out annoyed at Windows XP.
I started my job in December of 2005, and had to use a Mac there - and the transition was very, very easy. I started on OS 9.1, but soon got an upgrade to OS X. If you get a MacBook, you’re going to get OS X, which is very, very, VERY easy to transition to from Windows. Think of your dock kind of as part start bar, part QuickLaunch bar (the area of the start bar where you can keep icons). Keep everything organized - I keep all of my applications where they’re supposed to go, and keep all of my files in folders on the desktop for quick access. And you know the search feature on your PC? Mac has Finder, which is LOADS faster than the PC’s search function. If you lose something, don’t be afraid to go to Finder. And Mac Help actually helps.
I still use my old PC (which I gave to my boyfriend) for stuff sometimes, but very rarely. Mostly to play .wmv’s. Cuz other than that, my Mac has read everything I had on my PC. And there’s a ton of kick-ass programs that work just as well as PC programs, if not better.
And my GOD is ForceQuit an awsome function. My Mac doesn’t freeze NEARLY as often as my PC did. It still does, occasionally, but it’s a LOT harder.
~Tasha
Preview is my FRIEND…
~Tasha
Others have answered this, but I think their answers are incomplete, so let me take a crack at it. My qualifications: I write cross-platform, native Macintosh/Windows software for a living, so I’ve got machines that run the gamut from PPC Macs through AMD-64 Windows machines.
There are basically three ways you can run Windows on a Mac. The terms for them aren’t as universally agreed upon as you’d like to see, but I’ll call them emulation, virtualization, and native.
Emulation - Everything is “faked” by the host OS. The Mac is basically running a program that implements a PC’s hardware in software. The performance hit varies, but is generally very large. VirtualPC running on a PPC mac is an example, there are no current big-name emulators for the Intel Macs that I’m aware of.
Virtualization - The OS is “faked” by the host OS, but the CPU instructions don’t have to be. Virtualization only works where the client OS (Windows) can run on the same type of CPU as the Host OS (Mac OS in this case). Parallels can do this on the Intel Macs. The performance hit is still pretty big (say 25-50%), but much less than emulation, and for programs that are compute-bound (i.e. they spend their time calculating things, not messing with the screen) it can be extremely small. Another example of this is VMWare Server (I don’t know if betas of this are out yet, but it’s imminent).
Native - There is no host OS, the client OS is installed and runs directly on the hardware. Aside from some boot-time interactions, the performance hit is zero – it’s just like running a real Windows computer – because it is. Here’s one of the few places where you can compare Apples and other PC’s directly, and Apple comes out looking pretty good. For a few months when it first came out, my Intel iMac was the most powerful Windows machine I owned. Apple tends to use low/midrange video, but even Oblivion (for example) plays well on that machine. Apple’s BootCamp will set up your Mac so you can choose at boot time which OS you want.
There’s also a funny “middle ground” between emulation and virtualization, in the form of application emulator/virtualizers like Wine. This is basically a layer added to the MacOS that allows Windows applications to run “emulated” within the Mac OS environment directly. Betas are out now, I think. Performance is good, but compatibility is limited, only certain apps can be run with it (this increases all the time).