Ten whole Earth years ago, on this very blog, I asked myself the question: Am I ready to go Mac only? Today, I finally answer it.
Back then, I was certainly ready to try a Mac-only lifestyle. I already owned two, but my main computer was still a PC. I looked at the things I used regularly on it that might cause an issue if I were to move over to the Apple Ecosystem completely, and eventually took the plunge and spent an absurd amount of money on a shiny new iMac.
A shiny new iMac which is still going strong today, albeit at someone else’s house as I bought a replacement a couple of years ago. Yep, I’m all Apple now.
Looking back at my original post, I thought it interesting to see how I solved the issues I predicted facing, so I’ve listed them:
Hardware
I had a Dell printer/scanner at the time, which wouldn’t work on a Mac. Or so I thought! It turned out there was a way of making it work using a Lexmark driver. Unfortunately (or fortuitously?) it actually died soon afterwards, and I bought a very similar but supported Canon device, which is still working now.
I also had a Samsung laser printer, which I gave away. It turns out I rarely needed to laser print after all, as I never replaced it. In fact, I don’t do much printing of any kind, and the Canon printer/scanner is mainly for scanning.
At the time, my phone was a T-Mobile Vario II, running Windows Mobile or CE or something which I managed to get working with the Mac (to sync various things) with some cheap third-party software. I replaced it with a Vario III, which synced in the same way, but ultimately moved to an iPhone 3GS and I’ve been iPhone’d up since. So that inconvenience went away.
The last concerns I have were with my Game Boy and Game Boy Advance homebrew devices, which used parallel connectors not usable on Macs. I replaced the latter with a USB version, and have never actually needed the former again.
Software
Outlook 2003 was my mail client of choice back in 2008, but I moved over to Mail on the Mac reasonably easily. I even managed to bring all my mail over, albeit via an import into Thunderbird first. Calendars moved to iCal, contacts to Address Book.
I coded webpages in PHP using RapidPHP on the PC, but soon moved to Dreamweaver and now, mostly, it’s WordPress anyway so I’ve managed this changeover without hassle. Dreamweaver also negated the suspected need for a SitePublisher alternative, as it does that site upload/syncing job of that too.
I used Agent!, an ancient piece of software (and I was about 3 versions old at the time!) for Usenet access back on my PC. I’d intended to move to Thunderbird on the Mac, and did for a while, but then I discovered MacPorts and got the *nix mail and news client pine working. I’d used pine ten years prior to that at university, so understood it. Sure, it’s like a trip back to the Dark Ages even compared to Agent!, but it suited me fine. More recently, however, I discovered I could actually get Agent! running on a Mac under wine, so I do that now instead.
I survived!
However, I did cheat a little. On my original iMac, I actually managed to get a complete working replica of my old PC running in Parallels. For the few times I really needed Windows, I could pop into that. In reality, I rarely did so. A few times to run some games, the odd tool, to do some coding in VB for work, or to run Access, but that was it. Over the years the frequency of using it dropped too.
On my new iMac, I installed Windows 10 in Bootcamp, and I have to admit I’ve used that more than I did Parallels previously, but in reality only to play games in Steam. There’s Steam on the Mac of course, but half my Steam games are Windows only. Again though, booting into Windows is still a pretty rare occurrence. Not least because every time I do there’s hours of updates to install.
To answer my ten year old question then: yes. I was ready.
Addendum:
In the comments on my original post, I also discovered I’d lose Corel Draw and PhotoPaint – now replaced with InDesign and Photoshop – and PictureShark (which I used to watermark images), now replaced with Star Watermark.
“However, I did cheat a little. On my original iMac, I actually managed to get a complete working replica of my old PC running in Parallels.”
That’s exactly what I did with my old Amiga setup (using UAE, obviously) when I switched to Linux in 2005. Used it on and off for about six months. The only problem was that networking didn’t work very well in UAE back then, at least on Linux. But it definitely helped with the transition. I’d recommend anyone switching OSes to do the same. The virtualization options are vastly better now anyway.
“There’s Steam on the Mac of course, but half my Steam games are Windows only.”
Although I never had a Windows machine, I’ve picked up the odd thing in a bundle or free giveaway over the years, and Steam works fairly well under WINE on Linux. Would that be an option? The performance probably isn’t quite as good, but at least it’s more convenient than dual-booting.
I’ve had Steam running under wine but so many of the games that use it run horribly or crash. I also tend to play Steam games via a Steam Link (rarely actually on the computer directly), and the Windows version of Steam under wine just refuses to work in this way.
The Steam Link doesn’t work well with the Mac Steam client either, so even games that have a Mac version tend to be played from Windows.
Rebooting into Windows takes less than a minute these days anyway so it’s not a massive hassle. On my old Mac it would have taken aaaaaages.
This is almost the same time I started with Mac. My first Mac was a Macbook back in 2007. I enjoy Mac only. But I still have a PC for some few other things. Just wanted to add: in this time and age, to really have the “full experience” with Apple, you need to use all of its services (or as many as possible). I was “Mac only” at the beginning too, but now I have the Mac, an iPhone, I pay for cloud storage and have an Apple Music subscription. And let me tell you, it’s a completely different story. This is how it’s really meant to be used.
(But I cheat too, since I use Gmail and Google Calendar instead of Apple’s. Woops!)