If you want a killer laptop, MacBook Pro is by far and away
the best of the best and delivers top shelf performance.
Technology unveiled at CES two weeks ago will arrive
throughout 2012, but it could be very late in the year before
the laptop market reflects these new machines and really, if
you want a super thin and light, the MacBook Air is the best
of the best and has the processor power that previous versions
lacked. If you want an actual desktop (desk-side tower) it's
a matter of choosing operating systems because the machine
price/performance ratios aren't compelling. Apple will be
more expensive, but you get a turn-key machine with no
compromise on performance plus a local store for support and
applecare as a service contract (well worth the money.)
I run mostly Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) but have one
MacBook Pro (this thing under my fingers) running Lion.
Once you're accustomed to the convenience and simplicity of
the Mac, the PC becomes subjectively all the more painfully
cumbersome, even when running the same applications.
Since the "Sandy Bridge" Intel architecture came into
the Macs, their raw performance is as good as it gets, so
any price/performance advantage to a PC is whittled down
to a negligible degree except for technical applications.
If you want to compare performance, look at geekbench and
run it on your current machines to see just how
surprisingly slow they are and how fast a new Mac
performs.
Keep in mind you can always run Windows "on" a Mac
(either by installing both Mac OS X and Windows on the
same Mac, or by installing an application called Parallels
which creates a virtual environment in which Windows runs
happily and is perfectly stable and fast, at least in my
experience.)
As for compatibility, if the peripherals are recent
models or just about anything using USB, they'll work and
backward compatibility isn't painful. You can always
check their respective support site and look for the
necessary Mac OS X drivers. Usually, it's just a matter
of plugging it in and bingo.
The Apple Store "Genius" staff can schedule an
appointment to make the transition for you. I think it's
free. They'll take your old laptop, do a backup, fire up
the new Mac and transfer as much or as little as you wish,
right down to browser passwords and history, etc. I even
seen people with a delivery cart bringing in their old
desk-side PC tower and monitor ... I think Apple has
decided it's a strategic win to suffer the cost of
literally helping each user one by one to "make the
switch" as they say.
If you're reasonably competent and sure you can backup
and restore your current machine, it doesn't require a
trip to a store.
I'm currently debating updating an old Windows PC to a
12 core Mac Pro. The Mac is over $5K, but the two year
old PC cost that much and it benchmarks about the same as
my new MacBook Pro for half the price. Sheesh. The
Mac
Pro is twice as fast for the same money after two
years. Computers are cheap. My rationalization to update
is that the Mac Pro can mean an all Mac environment and
run Windows on Parallels for those tasks and still deliver
high performance (Parallels costs less than 10% according
my geekbench comparisons ... a 10,500 score on OS X
becomes a 10,000 score when running Windows 7 or Ubuntu 10
on Parallels 7.)
If you have older Windows applications, you'll most
likely have to pay to update licenses to new versions and
"migrate" to the Mac OS X platform. This is tedious or as
streamlined, case by case, depending upon the software
vendor and their state of health. For example, I still
run a PC with Quickbooks and Quicken for lack of
convenient migration path. I think Intuit is healthy and
moving to win back their Mac users, but we'll see. For
now, I see no luxury in having the accounting on a Mac, so
nothing is broken. All of these machines can "see" and
share files and printers and backups, so there's no leap
forward.
I should add that the new "App Store" approach to the
Mac is turning out to be a really nice way to sift through
the otherwise insurmountable hundreds of thousands of
seemingly identical applications on offer. There's also
the joy of not having everything preceded by a virus scan
or an update to repair or replace software broken or out
of date on the Windows 7 box. I have a pretty stable
environment on the Windows machines, but the intrusion of
virus threats can be a little tedious. So far, so good
and it's all free software, it's just a bit clunky
compared to the way OS X is so quiet and unobtrusive about
its updates.
And the final "win" I'll score to Apple is the
integration of the iPhone, iPad, iTunes, Apple TV and Mac.
It's finally at a point where almost anything you have is
available to each device with little or no effort. I
should mention I recently moved to a Google phone (the
grandly titled Galaxy Nexus) and the integration with the
Mac is just as good. I think Google is going to finally
challenge Apple now that Chrome really works and Android
(the equivalent of iOS on the iPhone) is, in my humble,
easier to use than iOS ... ironically, the "best" new
features on the iPhone 4 are old news to Android users
(except Siri, which is great ... Google voice command
isn't as clever, but it does work for calls and
navigation, even reads email, etc.)
The thing Apple products don't understand is having
multiple users for the same device like an iPhone or iPad
or Apple TV ... these all assume one user (even though
they have the appearance of multiple users, it doesn't
work out very well.) Google TV and Google Chrome (their
operating system equivalent of Mac OS or Windows, as well
as a browser) assume each user has a login and completely
separate interests, then Google+ handles sharing and
communication -- infinitely less painful than Facebook,
which my kids have finally, thankfully, deleted from their
lives, if only because their friends have gone
counter-culture and decided that FB is not cool.
To answer your question: "should be fine." : )
Adam
On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 11:11 AM,
Larry
<l02turner [at] comcast.net>
wrote:
I am considering taking the plunge and
changing to Apple products - but I have a
couple of laptops running Win7 that are still
very usable. If I change the desktop to Apple
type, will I have any compatibility problems?
Peripheral problems?
Thx
LarryT
comcast.net)