Switching to Mac

[415shooter]

Hey all,

I am deciding to make the switch from PC to Mac. I custom build the desktop I have, and have an HP computer. The Desktop has most everything from both the laptop and the desktop on its HD. I have an external harddrive, but its only 250GB. How would Ya'll suggest i store all my data which is roughly 500GB while I switch Computers. My plan was to sell the laptop to fund the purchase of the Macbook Pro I want. Then sell the Desktop, but I have a fear that I'll lose all my data between selling the laptop and getting the Mac to transfer the data too from the desktop.

Any suggestions?

[Peter.Steele]

Buy an external hard drive. I bought a WD 3 TB in a USB 3.0 housing a couple months back for $149.

[1LAGuy]

If you buy an external HD just make sure that it's formatted in something the Mac will read (ie: FAT32). Mac's don't natively read NTFS without 3rd party SW.

[4DSJW]

Agree that an external HD is the way to go for storage. Partition it when you format it so that you can use SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to boot your computer if your internal HD has a problem. You can use the same external HD for the Apple archiving software "Time Machine".

Make sure you look at the June 2012 models. They have USB3 which is 10x faster than USB2. They also have the proprietary Thunderbolt port which is 2x faster than the USB3. Make sure your external HD will work with these ports.

Also, look at the Apple Refurbished list for better prices and the same warranty. Keep in mind that the Retina Display models cannot be upgraded but the non-Retina Display models can be and take up to 16GB of memory, available from Crucial for about $100.

[wheels]

500GB of porn?

[ocabj]

Free server stacks like XAMPP and WAMP have Mac alternatives, but they suck, which was still more or less true when I checked a couple months ago.

I just compile apache, (Postgre|my)sql, and php from source. If the issue is having a way to bring up a dev environment from scratch constantly, why not use Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com/)?

[BenHa]

If you buy an external HD just make sure that it's formatted in something the Mac will read (ie: FAT32). Mac's don't natively read NTFS without 3rd party SW.

Oh god this was the worst for me. 3TB external Harddrive xD

[den888]

Have fun for the first few days during the transition. I bought my wife a Mac and she was pretty frustrated for the first few days, but loves it now!

[den888]

Have fun for the first few days during the transition. I bought my wife a Mac and she was pretty frustrated for the first few days, but loves it now!

[Deadbolt]

I'm just curious why you are switching to Mac? I ask because I have many computers (8 at my house, 4 at my business location), and by saying you are switching, it sounds like you intend to completely abandon Windows, which you may regret down the line.

My background is that I am a website dev. I use Windows, Mac, and Linux every day. Up until about 4 years ago I was using Windows exclusively, and bought the Mac mainly for display rendering for cross browser compatibility.

So, when I bought my Mac, I already had a bunch of Linux experience, which helped because I was pretty comfortable with the terminal. The downside (at the time) was that there was jack for free programs that I take for granted because I had been using Windows. Free programs like Notepad++ had no equivalent on Mac even when I tried buying one or two. Free server stacks like XAMPP and WAMP have Mac alternatives, but they suck, which was still more or less true when I checked a couple months ago. I could go on if you make me, but I think you get the point, I just wasn't really happy with the Mac. I couldn't switch. That doesn't mean I was going to throw the thing away, because I do use it for testing, but to me it was a hyped up product that didn't really deliver. Plus, all the BS about Macs not crashing is just plain wrong. I'd never really experienced any problems with my Windows computers, but the Mac is really a POS. Again, just my opinion.

I run tomcat, httpd, eclipse, a java portal, and mysql daily on my macbook.

It's not better or worse than what you would otherwise have on linux, its just a little bit of a pain in the *** to reconfigure user permissions to have everything setup to run like you would naturally get on a fresh linux deployment.

Only thing thus far im bitter about is lack of a good free subversion client. Versions was the best one I found (compatible with subversion 1.6.x+ ) and its a few bucks. I demand zero cost satisfaction

[DaveInOroValley]

You'll be happy with the change after the relearning curve which isn't that difficult in any case. Over the years I've had everything you can imagine both hardware and software wise and for me my numerous Macs just work when I need them.

As a matter of fact there was a comparison done a bit back that showed feature for feature the cost was not higher compared to a similar featured pc. That was a bit of a surprise as well since most people always use that as an arguement against.

[Rouge Recon]

500GB of porn?

Yes! Is there anything else 500GB is good for?

I feel there is a lot of undeserved hype in regards to Mac.

I agree with this from experience. I also agree with Skunk about keeping the PC around just in case.

But if you must sell: Before selling a computer, I always keep the hard drive and place it in a enclosure in case I need to refer back to it. Cloning software is good, but having originals of anything is always a plus. Buy a cheap, used HDD to replace the one inside the laptop.

If the laptop isn't worth the trouble of replacing the hard drive or isn't worth a lot on money, consider keeping it and find something else to sell or a cheaper computer to buy.

[MontClaire]

I own an Alienware PC for downloading and call of duty games. I own a MacBook Pro for work and everything else. iPad and iPhone too of course. If it helps.

[ocabj]

Consider this; I just built a computer for my Mom. Nothing too fancy, but Gigabyte mobo, i3 processor, 1TB HDD, and 8GB RAM. Spent about $600.00 in hardware. O/S is under $100 for Windows 7 (I hate Windows 8), or could have used Ubuntu for free, but why can't I buy OSX Mountain Lion? Because it's BS is why. If I could buy the Mac O/S separately I'd be way more likely to turn fanboy. What are they scared of?

It's an issue of support. If Apple started selling Mac OS X for use for "compatible" non-Apple hardware, they would open the door for a support nightmare because they'd now have to deal with support cases for OS X on non-Apple hardware; hardware they don't have any control of. Of course, Apple could decide to say, "We only provide phone/email/retail support for OS X on Apple hardware", but then they would have to deal with public/media backlash. If they end up deciding to provide support for OS X on non-Apple hardware, then they would have to increase support overhead (more employees, more training) which would result in an increased cost of the OS (which existing Mac users would balk at). Seriously, I consider OS X "free" since the cost of the OS is pretty much subsidized by the cost of the hardware.

Of course, there's the 'hackintosh' community where there is a knowledge base of hardware that is compatible with OS X and the workarounds necessary to get OS X on non-Apple machines. I thought about doing this myself. But then you have to worry about OS X not working on that machine whenever Apple releases an OS X update (because it often breaks functionality of OS X on 'hackintosh' boxes). This directly ties into the previous issue of 'support' in that Apple is able to maximize stability of their OS because they focus on it working on specific hardware and don't have to concern themselves about all of the other supposedly 'compatible' hardware out there, which is fundamentally what makes Windows so unstable. Windows itself is a stable OS. The 'instability' is introduced by the hardware drivers and runtime libraries introduced to the OS after the fact.

I've always stated that I was a long time Windows user. Every month back in my college days, all my Comp Sci buddies and I would hit the computer show and buy new hardware to upgrade our rigs and LAN party every weekend. I was heavy into Linux at the time as well (and later to FreeBSD when I became more server administrator oriented).

Then when OS X v10.1 came along, I realized it offered the best of Windows and Linux: a great windowing GUI on Unix core (I still don't like any of the windowing systems on Linux) with all the major enterprise and commercial software packages (Photoshop, Office, etc).

I understand that hardware cost is far better for Wintel vs Mac. But I still find that OS X is still the best OS for all things I do:

• Windows and Active Directory Administration
• Administration of Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD servers
• Security administration (e.g. firewalls and IDM)
• Photography post-processing workflow
• Development / Programming

and I'm willing to pay more for Apple hardware to use OS X.

But to each his own.

[brassburnz]

I had a PC at work that I needed to replace. I picked up a Western Digital 750 gig portable hard drive at Costco two years ago for about $90 and downloaded everything off of the PC that I needed. When I got my new PC at work, I was able to access the files from the WD hard drive without any problems.

I have a 2011 Macbook Pro at home running OS 10.6.8 and Parallels running Windows XP. When I plug the WD into the Mac, it asks if I want to run it as a Mac or PC. I run Microsoft Office on both the Mac and my work PC, although the work PC has a newer version. No problems opening and saving files from one machine to the other.

I would think about running Parallels on the MacBook just in case. You will need a licensed version of a Windows OS to make it run and the software. If you've got all of the original software it shouldn't be a problem. I had to buy a Windows OS because I didn't have an OS disk for my work PC.