Switched to Mac - 2week calguns review

[sd_shooter]

So I dumped my PC laptop and got a Mac! (Not dumped really, it's now in the garage for my kids to hammer on)

The good:
- The UI is very responsive, way faster than any Windows machine I've used
- Bootup/shutdown are fast. Wake from sleep is almost immediate, the machine is like a giant cell phone!
- The retina display is beautiful, the best screen I've ever seen
- The keyboard is very nice. Coming from a Lenovo... it's not quite as good but much better than anything else
- All my USB drives, printer and mouse "just worked" with it. Configuration was no worse than a PC, perhaps easier (at least for the mouse.)

The bad:
- It already froze once. I got the spinning beachball icon and it was unresponsive, had to reboot. It's not invincible.
- The keyboard mapping is not like a standard PC: No delete key (it's really a backspace), F2 doesn't work in Excel, Control doesn't work like a PC (must use 'command' instead)

Verdict:
- For home use, it's a good machine
- I can see how Macs will never make it in the professional world. I'd go nuts having to press Fn-Delete to delete a cell in Excel or any other app. No real function keys. The 'apple knows best' attitude at work in the design process

[Californio]

Launch Finder

Applications

Disk Utilities

Select the partition that has the OS

Repair Disk Permissions

see if that clears the hang

[ocabj]

You don't have to reboot. Just get to the Finder context, Apple Icon, Force Quit..., and kill the problematic application.

Or get to a shell, ps or top for the problematic program and kill -9 it.

[sd_shooter]

Repair Disk Permissions

see if that clears the hang

Will try (it's ok right now though)

You don't have to reboot. Just get to the Finder context, Apple Icon, Force Quit..., and kill the problematic application.

Or get to a shell, ps or top for the problematic program and kill -9 it.

Tried getting to finder but wouldn't go there. Beachball no matter what I touched.

[ebencikiv]

apple key, option, esc "like you would cntrl, alt, delete"

brings up the force quit menu

[xhy]

Also, Fn+Backspace should give you Delete functionality

[sd_shooter]

Tried the kill menu, was unresponsive.

Already installing key mappers to fix the delete and f2 keys.

[sd_shooter]

How to gain F2 functionality in excel:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macexcel/how-can-i-have-f2-on-excel-for-mac-in-stead-of/0fe7fdd7-19ac-4b89-b24f-482f7c12ce76

[sd_shooter]

So I fixed the 'delete key' problem and the 'F2 in Excel' with this free application, keyremap4macbook:

https://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/

Now the only thing missing is "focus follow mouse" which is standard on unix/linux systems and is possible to enable on all Windows platforms. It's very useful when working on multiple windows but without resorting to keyboard based switching (alt-tab) or clicking to raise.

Turns out it's _impossible_ on a Mac. By design the menu bar in each window occupies the top of the screen instead of being part of the window.

So you get good speed, great fonts and otherwise great system but get saddled with some wonky UI features (oh and the window control widgets are on the wrong side of the window too...)

[CGT80]

I am sorry you went to the dark side, OP. That is like giving up an XD for a Glock, or going from Chevy to Ford, 45 ACP to 357 sig, etc. Please don't tell me you are going to become an antigun liberal next

You won't find me going over to the dark side any time soon. I am glad to hear you mostly like what you bought. I tried linux a few months ago. I thought about moving away from windows. I tried win 8.1, which I hated, and decided 8.1 was closer to what I wanted. I like 75-80% of 8.1 now. There are still some very stupid ideas put into it, like the charms bar that I never use and can't disable and the start page which is useless and a pain, and the apps. I haven't tried any other "shells" to make it look different.

Software companies make me wonder if they ever beta tested the product and had feedback. They can do so much, yet we are still so limited in making the product work the way we want.

Have you tried a win 8.1 machine with a SSD rather than a standard hard drive? Mine is a mini system (gigabyte brix) with an SSD and it boots in 8 seconds and seems very fast. I also don't have any bloatware, as I built it (if you can call it that) and loaded windows myself. I was blown away at how fast the new machines can be. I haven't used any new Mac's so I was curious to see if they really are faster. It seems like everything is so fast now, that there isn't much room for noticeable improvement when opening programs. I can still remember using my first 80286 at 4 mhz

[bphx123]

Why not just install windows 7 on your mac? You can boot directly to it, or just use it via vmware or parallel, so when you need to use excel etc, you can just use it via windows.

[ocabj]

I haven't used any new Mac's so I was curious to see if they really are faster. It seems like everything is so fast now, that there isn't much room for noticeable improvement when opening programs. I can still remember using my first 80286 at 4 mhz

Right now, the key to system 'speed' is disk I/O (ssd) and multi-threading optimization.

The clock speed ceiling has been hit in the past few years, and the only thing CPU manufacturers can do is increase the number of cores.

Thus, it is up to the developers (OS and applications) to write code that optimizes multi-core / multi-threading.

As far as I'm concerned, disk I/O is still the limiting factor in most general cases.

[sd_shooter]

Have you tried a win 8.1 machine with a SSD rather than a standard hard drive?

Yes, my work machine is a modern Win laptop with an SSD. It does some things fast but in many ways it gets bogged down by the usual Windows quirks:
- Apps 'not responding' (for no apparent reason, likely network)
- Simple things like detecting a mouse or keyboard upon wakeup takes forever (30s)
- Brightness controls sometimes don't work, or audio
- Etc....

And this is a machine that's supported by an army of IT engineers, receives regular software patches and isn't used to view naughty websites. There are no ask.com toolbars, no bloatware, it's clean and should behave well.

Why not just install windows 7 on your mac? You can boot directly to it, or just use it via vmware or parallel, so when you need to use excel etc, you can just use it via windows.

And hamstring the machine with the one thing that made it suck?

Full discussion thread here: Link

[NytWolf]

Why not just install windows 7 on your mac? You can boot directly to it, or just use it via vmware or parallel, so when you need to use excel etc, you can just use it via windows.

If you hated Windows so much, why would you load Windows on your Mac? Oh! That's right, because Mac can't do everything.

[sd_shooter]

If you hated Windows so much, why would you load Windows on your Mac? Oh! That's right, because Mac can't do everything.

True.... that's why I kept my Win laptop. I have some Toyota Techstream SW on there that was a PITA to get running even on Windows. I'll keep it for when I need to hack my truck's Firmware settings.