So there I was, pounding out my 100-page thesis proposal on my Windows-based laptop, when “BAM” – yet another “blue screen of death”. My computer was slow, cumbersome, and for some reason had acquired some sort of virus, that only the people with computer know-how could fix. I’m not pretending to be someone who knows the first thing about computers. Previously, I had used them only for what I thought they were good for – word processing and email. I knew that I needed a change. Things were not working as they should on my PC, and besides, it was four years old anyway.

I explored the idea of a MacIntosh. I had never used one, and thought that they looked too “unprofessional” for a PhD candidate. The apprehensions I had were numerous: How would I run my statistics programs? Why are Macs so much more expensive? What happens when I submit a paper to my supervisor and he uses a PC? But the more I found out, the better the machines looked, and in August 2005, I bought an iBook.

Since there are many people who have, or are thinking about making the switch from a PC to a Mac, I thought that I would take a look at some of the common excuses there are to steer away from a Mac, and then list some of the reasons why you will be happier with a Mac.


Three common excuses

(1) I’ll have to learn to use a computer all over again!

You know this was one of my biggest fears concerning “the switch”, and yet it was the easiest to overcome. It really only took me a couple hours to get used to using things like the Apple command key and to set up my dock. Even using the Dashboard was easy to learn. Now when I use a PC, I find that everything is difficult to locate (knowing that Mac has Spotlight), and the Windows operating system is just not “user-friendly”.

TIP: Learning about Mac is not about learning a new operating system. Rather it is about finding the parallelism with your current OS and understanding how you would be able to do the same things on a Mac.

(2) My programs just won’t work on a Mac

I guess this “excuse” is directed more at people like me – users who need “special” programs. In my case these are scientific programs used for things like statistical analyses. Much to my surprise, some people who worked in my department were Mac users already and showed me that there are Mac versions of those programs, and in some cases, there were much better programs available (that just happened to be free) that did the same procedure, but much more efficiently and easily.

TIP: When considering to switch to Mac, do not ask for instance, “Will my Outlook work on Mac?”. Instead you want to ask, “What application on Mac will help me handle my mail?”.


(3) My documents will be incompatible with my colleagues’ PCs

This excuse is completely wrong. In fact, if I am sending a Word document or something of that nature I have no problem whatsoever and Mac comes with this neat “Compatibility Check” which will tell you if something will not work on another version of the same program. Something else which I have discovered and use extensively, is that Macs give you the ability to convert any document into a PDF, which makes it much easier to send large files (such as images) over email.

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