The case against switching to a Mac

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Rafe Needleman CNET News

Published: 13 Jan 2009 15:41 GMT

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Think moving from a Windows PC to a Mac is easy? CNET Webware editor Rafe Needleman says his recent experiences may make you reconsider. 

When my latest ThinkPad began to get unreasonably slow, as Windows laptops often do after a year or so of use, I thought it would be a good time to move to the Mac platform for a while to see what all the fuss was about. My wife's three-year-old laptop was also running out of steam, so I thought we could make the change together.

I was looking forward to an interesting period of learning a new platform, and thought my wife, a heavy email and internet user but not someone who enjoys tinkering, would appreciate the fit and finish of products in the Apple ecosystem. I didn't think we'd have to give up much.

We bought ourselves a matched pair of MacBooks and went cold turkey over the holidays, leaving the Windows machines at home while we travelled to my wife Jennifer's parents for a 10-day stay. Technologically, it was not the happiest of breaks.

Before I get into the things that have been driving us batty, let me just say the Apple hardware we moved to is gorgeous and has been reliable. I'm enjoying the stability of OS X and the genius of the multitouch trackpad. And I love that once I've put the MacBook to sleep by closing the lid, I don't have to worry about it not restarting when I open it.

But when it comes to the applications my wife and I use, and moving data from Windows to Mac, and accessing hardware we already have, the process of switching continues to be rocky. Not all the issues we have are with Apple products, and that's rather the point: no platform exists in a vacuum. People use other apps, and have their own training and hardware. Switching means overcoming a lot of technological inertia.

User interface
The first hurdle anyone switching from a Windows PC must negotiate is the shift to the Mac OS X interface. The shortcut keys and user interface conventions of Windows don't apply on a Mac. Some of the changes are easy to make, but others are not. I am getting used to other user interface differences touted as superior by Mac nuts, even though I don't appreciate them.

The Mac menu bar is always on the top of the screen, not the application window, so you can end up with a menu bar for one program showing while your workspace is from another. The oddity vanishes with a click of a mouse, but it makes no sense to me, user-interface theory notwithstanding. And so on. Nothing major, and the concepts are not radically different. It's like learning a new dialect of your mother tongue.

Email
Both Jennifer and I were using Outlook on our PCs before we moved to the Mac. I connect to work Exchange servers, and my wife uses POP email hosted by her small company. I loaded up Entourage on my Mac so I could continue to use our corporate servers. I found it a pale imitation of Outlook. It doesn't do as much — no colour-coding by rule, for example — and the interface is quirky.

There is a three-pane view, as in Outlook, but you can't customise it, and it's a big waste of space. I may learn to accept it, but I don't think so. I put Jennifer on Mac Mail and it's working satisfactorily for her new email.

The real problem was importing messages from Outlook into a Mac Mail app. There's no easy way of doing it. Neither Entourage nor Mac Mail reads Outlook PST archive files. There is a workaround: use the PC version of Mozilla Thunderbird as an intermediary. It reads PSTs and writes MBox files, which Mac Mail imports. There is also a paid app, Outlook2Mail, but it didn't work for us.

Unfortunately, Mail on Jennifer's Mac would crash after I imported the MBox files from Thunderbird. A little Google searching led me to rebuild the Mac Mail index file, which seems to have fixed the problem. But I moved us to Macs to avoid this kind of hackery.

Apple says stronger support for Exchange severs in Mac Mail will be coming in the Snow Leopard release of OS X this year.

Calendar and mobile devices
Jennifer can't stand Apple's iCal. There's no week view that shows as much information as you can get in Outlook, and she's been getting invitations to meetings sent from Outlook users without critical information in them.

Personally, I find the calendar in Entourage just fine. But Jennifer is also a BlackBerry user. To date, we have not found a workable way to sync her Mac and her company's group Yahoo event calendar to the handheld. PocketMac, distributed by RIM, simply does not work for her as advertised.

A popular workaround that uses Google services as an intermediary won't work for her either. It requires Jennifer to upgrade her company's Yahoo calendar to the new version, but doing so will cause her colleagues' installations of Intellisync to fail, leaving them without Outlook sync for their calendars.

For these reasons, she's now using her old laptop alongside her new Mac, and keeping a paper calendar as well. This is clearly not a workable strategy and is causing some friction in our marriage as well. Thanks a lot, Mac.

Photos
Compared with Picasa, which Jennifer and I had been using on our Windows machines, the Mac's iPhoto product is frustrating. Its need to create copies of images on our hard disks makes no sense to us. Having to import...

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