Making the move to the Mac

"The desktop war has been won," he said. "It's the web and mobile." Image: Getty.

The unbearable lightness of a MacBook Air.

It's been about 25 years since I last used an Apple computer.

My reluctant retirement from the Mac world was forced upon me. At the time I was editing New Zealand PC World, so working on a Mac really wouldn't do - although I always thought the fact that the magazine was produced on Macs was an unacknowledged hypocrisy.

Over the ensuing years, beginning with Dos and then the numerous iterations of Windows, I learned a kind of love for the barbarian PC. It was a fickle beast, prone to busting for inexplicable reasons, but as long as I regularly sacrificed a goat to the
blue-screen-of-death deity, we generally got along.

Others have said that if the Apple world is a walled garden of harmony and light, the PC is like living in Detroit. It's a bit wild and you might get shot at any time.

There's probably some truth to that, but it's worth pointing out the PC has always been considerably cheaper, until now. My rule of thumb ever since clone PCs arrived here in the mid eighties is that around $2000 should get you pretty close to state-of-the-art.

I've also always tried to battle forced obsolescence, refusing to upgrade unnecessarily to faster, better, smarter.

The result is I live with older technology longer than many.

All my adult, Mac-literate children, regard my Windows XP monolith, now running painful slow, as a joke and constantly berate me as an idiot for remaining PC-loyal. Ditto my ancient Android smartphone, which is actually quite dumb.

I chose finally to make my momentous migration about a week before three weeks of complicated overseas travel. After all, this was a Mac move so what could possibly go wrong on the most "insanely great" computer ever invented?

As it turns out, quite a lot - unlearning 25 years of PC habits doesn't come easy; migrating 10 years of old Outlook Express email from PC to Mac is insanely difficult (still haven't solved it); and when you travel, it's amazing how little problems - Word for the Mac's spellchecker stops working, finding a free media player for WMA audio files - drive one to insanely great rage.

That said, I do feel incredible street cred, despite being in the wrong age demographic, when I pull out the 13inch Air or the MacBook Pro at the relatively cheap (for New York) but uber-cool Pod51, the sort of MacBook Air of hotels.

Actually, the mattress in our pod was uncomfortable, the air conditioning roared and the compact design, while a great in principle, could have done with more careful detailing - i.e. easily accessible power points to recharge the myriad of battery charged devices one carries these days, a more usable basin and better luggage storage. The toilet-shower compartment was, however, novel.

The Air on the other hand - sleek, silver, sultry, light as a feather - is a wonder of near perfect compact design.

This has almost always been the way of Apple - aesthetically pleasing in comparison to the butt ugly, functional, cheaper PC.

But while I'm happy to appreciate fine design along with the next man or woman, I remain perplexed as to how Apple devices in all their glorious incarnations have managed to create such an army of fanatical fan-people who will leap to the defence of the Apple Corporation even when it's being evil. E.g. see here and some of the comments here.

So far I have to say I'm not finding our new MacBooks much easier to use than our old XP PC and Windows 7 laptop.

They do, however, show up the Achilles heel of the snail-like PC by starting up in a flash.

When it comes to day-to-day use in programs like Word or Excel and email, there's really no difference. In many ways I think the PC, with its right mouse click, is actually more intuitive and user friendly. Apple was slow to get on board with this ease-of-use innovation and while there are all sorts of ways to emulate the right click with gestures or shortcut keys, I have to confess I'm still floundering between the two. I'm leaning towards gestures because I find shortcut keys too much a reminder of a painful, primitive PC past when one pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del on a far too regular basis.

Bizarrely, Mac aficionados seem to prefer shortcut keys over the Apple's cross platform elegant gestural movements - tap, scroll, pinch, swipe, etc. Meanwhile, I'm still finding the two-finger tap on the multi-touch trackpad for right-click weird.

How am I doing? During the travels I caught up with the brother-in-law who had made a similar change a few years ago.

He said he was grumpy for two weeks then didn't look back. I'm now in my third week and still grumpy, mainly because of software migration issues, in particular my email archive, which is incredibly valuable to me.

I also hate Mac Mail and am yet to settle on a mail program I'm happy with.

Perhaps it's habit, but I've grown fond of Outlook Express' pared back simplicity. I have Outlook, but I find it bloated with too many annoying bells and whistles.

The move has also highlighted how, thanks to Google, you can pretty much instantly find a solution to any problem you're having.

Just as users in the PC world rush to help each other with advice on various problems on online forums etc, so it is in the Apple world, possibly with more patriotic fervour.

Great, but what this really highlights is that both PCs and Macs are still not that user friendly.

There's still a lot of crappy software out there and Apple's walled garden has its share of noxious weeds.

Ask me again in another week, but I'm finding the Mac world, while clearly more beautiful than the PC, is no Garden of Eden.

And while I love the Macbook's seductive design, I'm unlikely to join the army of Mac fanatics happy to support Apple's quest for world domination.

At least in the PC world, we call bull**** when we see it.