what's wrong

so seriously, if mac is so great, why doesn't everyone own one...i'm REALLY leaning toward buying a mac in a week or two and would like to know what i'm getting myself into. i've read much on the pro's of a macbook, but in all honesty, what are the cons??

 

-Not Windows, I prefer Windows over OSX.
-Underclocked X1600.
-A little extra heat.
-Overpriced even if you get all the extra "Apple Software".
-Bootcamp isnt gonna be free eventually.
-Having to buy an extra copy of Windows XP or Windows Vista to run if you use bootcamp.
-Not as much software and game support as Windows.

 

For me, the main cons at them moment are non-universal versions of office and PS. But that will change over the course of this year, but, at least for office its still gonna be a abit of await.
Apart from that, I switched just before Xmas, and now want to switch the rest of my pc's...just have to wait for the cash to build up.
The only other minor pain is the odd website that requires MS explorer....the mac version finishes at 5, and is crap..so I wont install it on principal, thus I'm locked out from using some websites...(maybe 1-5% .
There is a learning curve, and there will be some switching pains...for eg I have had some issues with degraded wireless networking....for some reason if my router hasn't been rebooted for awhile, my macbook's wirless connection slows down to as much as 10X below its maximum....also took me a while to find the section for selecting/changing the home wireless network default name....so that i could connect to other pc's on my home network more quickly.
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ps as for why mac's aren't owned by everyone, thats because for most of the 90's, MS did a much better job of providing/marketing their product, esp to business's, people got locked in, and once you are, switching is a costly, time consuming pain. But now the cost and easy of switching is much more reduced, combined with OSx, which is, a much better os then MS xp. The same cannot be said for OS8/9 and window 95/98/2000, where the divide was imho the other way around...thus windows dominance over the past 10+years.
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wow, very very helpful! thanks a lot!! now i just have to figure out where is the cheapest place to get one...

 

As you even said, you can install Windows so "not Windows" doesn't count. Also, Bootcamp will come free of charge with Leopard, even though you're right that it isn't gonna be free for Tiger owners, and that you need the extra $ to buy a Windows copy. The X1600 is not underclocked on C2D Macbooks Pro, so please stop repeating that. The extra heat bit is true, but you should count in the extra-silence and the extra thinness. This also should balance the "overpriced" issue, Macs are more expensive but you should compare notebooks of similar designs, as thin, light and silent as a MBP.

 

Since Apple's switch to the Intel platform there are a lot fewer reasons not to go Mac (as thier 30% increase in PC sales begins to indicate).

The big one I can see are:
- Single PC manufacturer so limited models to choose from
- Still in transition to Intel and OS X so limited third party hardware and software.
- Learning curve to switch to both OS and different applications

I've personally found the switch worthwhile. I've been able to find the same application for the Mac about 25% of the time, a compatible substitute application about 50% of the time, a different application that allows me to accomplish the same task about 20% of the time, and that last 5% I use XP under Parallels.

I found myself grinning ear to ear yesterday and just wanting to share my wonderful Mac experience over the past couple of months. No particular reason other than doing very complex things completely trouble free.

 

Underpantman got it right. It was the early 90's where Apple could do no right. MS was in the right place at the right time with the right product. Not to say Windows does not deserve their dominance or was luck. Luck helped, but they still had to take advantage and they did.

Having said that, I think you are seeing a slight backlash. Half of all Macs bought in the Apple Store are from first time Mac owners. The vast majority of the Mac users in this forum are switchers, in fact I don't think we have a single long time user of Apples. Look at a place like mac-forums.com and one of the most active forums is the switcher's. Now I don't think Apple will ever have a majority share of the market, and I think Vista will certainly help stop the bleeding, but I think Apple could get to 10-20% market share in the next decade.

 

The largest drawback, for me, is Adobe software. It's not yet in a Universal Binary form. I believe thats why Flash crashes a lot on mac (I see it on all macs, not just mine). But once they have a UB of all Adobes software, that should take care of that.

What Wooky said is correct, USAPat is wrong on pretty much everything. The heat is negligable and something that any thin performance machine will run into. In fact, I doubt any of these people have ever compared the heat from a MBP against that of any other machine running a CD or C2D. In my experience, they all get hot under load. The difference being that it's hot air blowing onto your legs with other machines, on the mac, it's just radiating heat. But the heat isn't really that bad.

 

I have used C2Duo machines in both Macbook Pro form and PC form, and the MBP's are much much warmer.

Radiating heat through an Aluminum case is much worse than air blowing out the back of a machine.

it is very livable, but there is absolutely no doubt that they get hotter than then need to be, many simple solutions to how much heat radiates out of them.

 

Everyone has their own preferences, that's why not everyone owns a Mac.

Many like to game and therefore stick with Windows but now that Windows can be installed/run via BootCamp that isn't a problem.

Of course the Macbook/Pros are going to be a bit warmer because they are only 1" thick while being portable (~5lbs).

I only wondered why I didn't switch sooner...

 

For me it comes down to the lack of choice...the fact that you have to buy Apple hardware to use their software pretty much is a deal breaker. Not everyone likes the the look of a macbook or macbook pro. Plus if you want to buy a Mac(a laptop) you have to spend ~$1000 just for the base version. What if you had only $700, $800 budget?

I would buy the OS just as is but I'm not quite interested in buying the hardware from apple.

 

Acrobat IS written for the new intel macs. But photoshop, I don't know. Whatever. For your word processing needs, NeoOffice is a much better (and free) suite than MS Office. It can do stuff like save in .doc and convert files to PDF. My school's in windowsland, so they use office, but I didn't have any difficulty using a mac in windowsland. And best of all, I didn't have to take my mac into the IT people. They tend to screw up a lot and they install crap that I don't need. And once I heard they installed stuff meant for windows on somebody's mac and all hell broke loose.

Yeah but cons:
-slight price premium, although not really.
-It won't play games if you're into that kind of stuff.
-Apple is the sole manufacturer of macs, although I think that's a good thing.
-MS office isn't universal binary yet, but that doesn't bother me.
-It does get a little bit warmer, although I only heard my fans go off about twice in 3 weeks, when I was burning about 10 CDs off of iTunes. On my old PC laptop I heard the fan go off about 5 times more than that in an hour. And my old PC laptop was a 1.26GHz Pentium something and my mac is a 2.16GHz core 2 duo.
-Macs ARE less user-customizable. Actually that's not true, you can do it, it's just more difficult than on a PC. Some see this as a con, but I think this is a pro. I wouldn't know the first thing about electrical engineering if it slapped me in the face, so I'm going to leave it to someone who knows what they're doing.

Pros:
-It's not windows. I don't like windows.
-It looks beautiful.
-It comes ready to go out of the box.
-It took me (pretty computer illiterate...come on, I can't do HTML) 4 minutes in total to get my macbook pro up and running.
-It's truly plug and play. No dialogue boxes that say "Stop whatever you're doing and look at me"
-It works REALLY well with my iPod.
-It doesn't get viruses.
-My macbook pro came with an webcam AND a built-in mic. Thus I don't need a special headset to go on skype.
-Apple customer service is top notch. You get on the phone and in 30 seconds, you're talking to an American person from Cupertino. Or something. Either that or I'm talking to somebody at an Apple Store in god-knows-where.
-NO BLOATWARE!!!!

I'm still banging my head against the wall for not getting my sister an iMac when she needed a new computer.

 

Of course, the primary reason that Mac OS doesn't have the same market share as Windows is because it only runs on hardware from one manufacturer... Apple, compared to the multitude of companies that produce PCs and PC components.

 

I think its mostly large corporations and gaming that's restricting Mac OS X's growth...I mean the corporations have spent millions in software that don't have a Mac equivalent...they're not about to spend more money to re-buy perfectly good PC software.

And gaming on Mac is...barely anything. If you read a poll going around the Apple forum, a lot of people that switched to Mac still use Windows for gaming. Like that YouTube video, the guy states a few games for Mac and then "Photoshop..." .

But other than that Mac OS X is great.