Wiley Switching to a Mac For Dummies, Mac OS X Lion Edition
Contents
1. 22 Part I Informed Switching Starts Here2. and has to be replaced in a couple of years is no bargain When you price configurations from quality manu facturers that match the standard features on a Mac the difference in price drops and often disappears In the United States you can buy a complete and very usable Mac desktop setup for less than 600 assuming that you already own a suitable display keyboard and mouse and you can buy an ultralight MacBook Air laptop for less than 1 000 If those prices are too much for your budget see the tips in Chapter 3 for getting a Mac for less The arguments for buying a Mac are based on quality and total cost of owner ship not on initial purchase price PCs have hidden costs such as virus pro tection software and periodic disk rebuilding and they generally are replaced more often than Macs are Few people boast about how cheap their car is or how little they spent for their home entertainment center Quality matters and when cash is scarce quality matters even more Switching is too hard I m not saying that switching from a Windows PC to a Mac is painless If you ve been using Windows for a while you re used to its idiosyncrasies You made a big investment in learning how to use all that Windows software not to mention the amount you paid for it You may find some aspects of the Mac hard to get used to though I guide you through them all in Chapter 4 But on the whole switching isn t that bad Macs and Windows PCs h
3. You have to buy a copy which is an added expense But both operating systems run fine on a Mac and you can still use Mac OS X when you re not working Using third party virtualization software you can run both operating systems at the same time with Windows applica tions appearing on the Mac OS X desktop alongside native Mac applications I tell you more about how all this works in Chapter 16 Macs are a poor game platform True more games exist for the PC but plenty are available for Macs including top titles like World of Warcraft Call of Duty StarCraft IT and Spore Many more are coming Large game companies like Blizzard have committed to the Mac platform though many independents have not The Apple iPad iPhone and iPod touch have proved to be successful portable game platforms attracting new game developers to the Apple universe All low end Macs include inte grated graphics processors the high end Mac mini all iMacs and the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pro laptops add a second high performance AMD Radeon HD graphics chip and the Mac Pro can be ordered with two top of the line graph ics processors Multicore main processors add more graphics performance and Lion s OpenGL unlocks the power of these graphics devices for more com puting tasks If you re a serious gamer you probably know all about the latest graphics processors but I tell you more about them in Chapter 2 Windows 8 will kill Apple Microsoft s
4. S Both versions include iPod music a pair of cameras and video technology and direct Internet access via Wi Fi or cellular phone links Apple includes a version of its operating system called iOS in the iPhone iPad and iPod touch with a well integrated and easy to use interface all in spectacularly elegant packages Apple gives away a version of its iTunes music software that runs in Windows The company is betting that iPod iPad and iPhone customers who use Windows will be impressed by iTunes ease of use and will give the Macintosh a closer look when they re ready to upgrade their computers You find out more about iTunes in Chapter 11 Switching Sides Can Sting The Mac versus PC debate ranks as one of the great divides in the modern world Just because these feelings are whipped up by marketing departments doesn t mean that they lack emotional impact Your computer choice forms part of your personal identity Mac users have a reputation for a certain smugness You just got a virus You mean like a cold Much of that atti tude is defensive of course It s no fun being a minority in a PC dominated Chapter 1 Why Switch Demystifying the Mac Mantra 9 world You bought a what Are they still making those Few other choices we make in life can be as self defining perhaps religion political party and sports team to cheer for People who move from New York City to Boston for example invariably suffer me
5. When Jobs returned to Apple he restored artistic quality to prominence at Apple From the original lollipop colored iMacs to the latest iPad Apple products have won awards for excellence in industrial design Figure 1 1 shows the elegant current iMac all in one computer Quality industrial design means more than arranging all the buttons and jacks in a pleasing way It also means questioning each feature and eliminating unnecessary doodads The result is something that isn t just easy to look at but also easy to understand and simple to work with a Figure 1 1 The iMac offers everything you need in one smart package The Magic Trackpad shown here is a handy option Chapter 1 Why Switch Demystifying the Mac Mantra 7 OO o Photo courtesy of Apple Inc A case in point is the optional Apple Remote Remotes for most consumer products rival an airplane cockpit in complexity the Apple version has just six buttons Looking forward not backward Apple leadership in technology extends beyond picking winners Apple is also the company that decides when to tell a once popular technology You re fired It was the first to introduce 3 inch floppy disks on personal computers and the first to drop their use as a standard feature Other tech nologies that Apple was the first to drop include the RS 232 serial port and the dialup modem You can still find these features as external add ons if you really nee
6. with On the other hand Apple has the resources skills and commitment to try to keep ahead of the mal ware threat OS X Lion introduces important security improvements and Apple issues regu lar security fixes through its Software Update program Good security practices still make sense in the Mac world and tell you ways to keep your Mac secure in Chapter 10 Apple is the industry thought leader Anyone who follows the high tech industry is used to reading articles about amazing new technologies that are going to revolutionize our lives and then never hearing about them again One of Apple s roles in the computer industry is picking and choosing among those new ideas For the most part technologies that Apple picks are adopted by the rest of the industry par ticularly by Microsoft Apple may not have invented the graphical user inter face Wi Fi wireless networking USB the smartphone or tablets but Apple s adoption and careful implementation of these technologies made them indus try standards Apple users get the good new stuff first Appearances matter Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover Sometimes function follows form Early in Apple s history Steve Jobs recognized that aesthetics matter The design team that created the first Macintosh computer included a fine artist who was involved in everything from the design of the graphical inter face to the artwork on the cardboard box that the Mac came in
7. Chapter 1 Why Switch Demystifying the Mac Mantra In This Chapter Why switch Overcoming objections Advantage Apple It s okay to switch A pple Macintosh computers aren t perfect They can t cure bad breath save your marriage or fix a bad hair day Talk to enough Mac owners and you ll find one who thinks he got a lemon and wasn t satisfied with Apple s service You can probably find a cheaper computer that will do what you really need The majority of computer users get by using Microsoft Windows and you can too So why even think about switching Macs offer a far better experience that s why Value matters in tight economic times In big ways such as security and industrial design and in countless little details Apple makes the extra effort to get things right right for the user not for some corporate purchas ing department For those of us who spend a good part of our lives in front of a video display those easier to use controls well thought out software choices and better hardware fit and finish all add up to create a tool that lets us do what we want and doesn t get in our way For more casual users the simpler Mac design means less head scratching while you figure out how to perform that task Life is too short for Windows aggravation Computers are now integral parts of our lives We use them for work for play and for communication we use them to find mates to shop to express ourselves to educa
8. Chapter 16 Macs are dying out Macs were close to dying out in the 1990s Their share of the personal com puter market was less than 3 percent That share has been climbing steadily however and at last report was 15 percent in the United States Market share doesn t tell the whole story however Apple commands some 35 percent of all profits made from selling personal computers Its competitors are locked in a death spiral competing on price and doing everything they can to shave costs at the expense of quality The success of the iPad the iPhone the iPod and the iTunes Store makes more PC users consider Apple More than half of all new Macs are purchased by people who were using Windows and 40 percent of college students buy Macs MBER we amp Chapter 1 Why Switch Demystifying the Mac Mantra 13 Macs are not expandable Since the earliest days of the IBM Personal Computer PCs have come in big boxes that a user could open to install expansion cards or to add memory and hard drives Steve Jobs horrified the techie end of the PC world when he built the original Macintosh as a self contained unit that users weren t sup posed to open Although Apple offers a model with expansion slots the top of the line Mac Pro and although memory slots on current Macs are easy to access Apple encourages expansion by hooking up accessories with easier to use high speed cabling Apple invented FireWire a blazingly fast expans
9. army of developers big and small A built in camera and powerful FaceTime videoconferencing software All new Macs laptops and iMac desktops that have a built in display have the camera and the software works with industry standards Some longtime Windows only software is now available for the Mac as developers have realized that they were missing an important market One example is AutoCAD widely used by architects and mechanical designers Another is the popular QuickBooks accounting system for small business though it lacks some features of the Windows version Moreover the Mac OS X operating system is built on top of Unix and Apple follows the Single Unix Specification SUS Therefore a large amount of software developed for Unix and Linux operating systems can run on your Mac including many popular free open source packages Much of that software doesn t run in Windows Finally Macs can also run Windows so you can still run the odd program for which an equivalent isn t available on the Mac All new Macs run on Intel microprocessors the same ones that power most Windows machines In fact any Mac sold since mid 2005 is also a full fledged strictly kosher PC one that can run the Windows 7 operating systems as well as any PC on the market So if you must run software that s available only for Windows you can use it on a Mac too Yeah you have to buy and install Windows sepa rately but I walk you through that task in
10. ave more commonalities than they have differences And Apple has new tools to make switching even easier including a Windows Migration Assistant described in Chapter 6 and an optional One to One program at the Apple store that does the file transfer work for you All in all I think that you ll find a switch easy enough and worth the effort TIl be left with no software Many Windows advocates claim that less software is available for the Macintosh The standard smart aleck Mac user answer is Yeah we really miss all those viruses and spyware programs But some truth to this objec tion exists Certain highly specialized programs run only in Windows Where equivalents exist for the Mac you may have fewer choices 11 2 Part I Informed Switching Starts Here On the other hand thousands of software titles are available for the Mac and they cover the needs of most users quite well In fact some great software is available only for the Mac Every new Mac comes with the following Apple applications These applications handle your e mail instant messaging address book calendar and of course iTunes 1 The Apple iLife suite This collection of programs lets you manage photos make movies authoring DVDs create websites and compose your own music It even teaches you how to play an instrument 1 The Mac App Store An easier way to buy quality inexpensive software Pioneered for the iPhone It attracts an
11. corporations A Microsoft engineer revealed in his blog that one of the company s corporate users had 9 000 programs for Windows The user simply couldn t afford to update them for new releases Microsoft Windows has to support all the old software that s out there Apple is better able to let go of the past and therefore is more nimble in developing new ways to make your life easier Apple sees its mission as harnessing the rapid advances in computing hardware to create revolutionary new products that improve our lives The Macintosh the iPad and the iPhone are all filled with groundbreaking innova tions They re cool to look at and to own Why buy boring Taking Vour Best Shot The question of which is a better personal computer a Macintosh or a Windows PC provokes passion matched by few other controversies Were the world less civilized Apple fans would long since have been burned at the stake by the more numerous Windows users who are fed up with hearing how great Macs are Instead the debate rages over claims that Macs aren t suitable choices because they re too this or can t do that The following sec tions outline the principal objections Chapter 1 Why Switch Demystifying the Mac Mantra Macs are too expensive These days every dollar counts At this writing you can buy a new Windows computer for as little as 300 Netbooks sell for even less But a cheap prod uct that causes you daily aggravation
12. d them but Apple realized that most of us no longer do Letting go of old technology wards off the feature bloat that plagues the computer industry Unneeded features increase complexity and make machines harder to use and more prone to problems 18 Part I Informed Switching Starts Here Getting top notch products Apple makes money on the products it sells Unit for unit Apple is the most profitable company in the industry How does the company do that with such a small share of the market The same way that Mercedes Benz or BMW or Armani does by branding Apple doesn t sell products that are interchange able with products sold by half a dozen other companies It sells unique products products that are sufficiently superior that customers willingly pay a bit more for them The benefit to you as a Mac buyer is the simple reality that no company can keep such an enviable position in the long run without delivering top notch goods You do get what you pay for iPad iPod and iPhone Apple s runaway success with the iPod personal music player introduced in 2001 has given the company the kind of market dominance in mobile com puting that Microsoft has enjoyed in the PC market The iPhone has been hailed as a revolution in personal communications It comes in two versions a four band phone that uses the worldwide GSM standard allowing its use anywhere and a version compatible with the Qualcomm standard used by Verizon in the U
13. ded PC compatible floppy drives and is now exemplary in sticking to indus try standards Indeed Apple was the first to popularize now ubiquitous com puter industry standards such as Wi Fi wireless networking and the Universal Serial Bus USB Other standards gobbledygook that Macs support include Gigabit Ethernet Bluetooth IEEE 1394 FireWire PCI Express Thunderbolt see Chapter 3 for more details and the Intel microprocessor architecture The Apple web browser Safari also available for Windows carefully follows the latest HTML5 Internet standards more so than Microsoft s Internet Explorer does Part I Informed Switching Starts Here Will Apple license OS X for other PCs A perennial question in the Apple watching community is whether Apple will license its OS X operating system to run on other PCs After the Apple switch to Intel processors there remains no technical reason why this can t be done Indeed Apple has to go to some lengths to discourage clever programmers from modify sold by other manufacturers One scenario has Apple mimicking the Microsoft strategy and selling OS X to anyone to run on any computer that meets minimal standards Every indication says that Apple will continue to try to keep OS X to itself and follow its high end branding strat egy but Apple is known for creating surprises ing hacking OS X to run on personal computers need Windows for work So run Windows on your Mac
14. e names was prophetic a utilitarian contraction versus a friendly fruit icon The Apple II quickly supplanted the primitive Apple and propelled Apple Computer to early leadership in personal computing Dan Bricklin wrote VisiCalc the world s first spreadsheet program for the Apple II If you crunch num bers for a living imagine what the world was like when a spreadsheet was just a wide piece of ruled paper on which calculations were recorded one at a time by hand and you can appreciate the impact of VisiCalc Microsoft got its big break when International Business Machines IBM decided to try its hand at making a personal computer and chose Gates company to supply the all impor tant operating system Although IBM is now a well respected name in computing back in the 1970s it pretty much owned commercial com puting Almost every major corporation in the world used IBM computers Young computer professionals were told by older hands that no one was ever fired for buying IBM Some Apple Ils had made their way into the corpo rate world because of VisiCalc but they were soon replaced by beige boxes sporting IBM logos the Microsoft operating system named DOS and an even better spreadsheet program Lotus 1 2 3 The Apple Il was a hard act for Apple to follow Apple made two disastrous attempts the Apple III a souped up Apple II and the Lisa The Lisa was a machine ahead of its time pioneering the use of a mouse to mov
15. e a pointer on the screen and letting users initiate actions by manipulat ing icons representing programs data files and hard drives for example But this graphical user interface couldn t overcome a 10 000 starting price and few Lisas were sold Jobs fed up with the increasingly corporatized development environment at Apple led a ren egade team to develop a more affordable com puter based on much of the same technology as Lisa The new Macintosh was announced during the 1984 Super Bowl in what is perhaps the best television commercial ever made You can view it at www uriahcarpenter info 1984 html Besides its mouse and graphical user inter face the Macintosh was packaged as a single unit with a built in high resolution for its time black on white screen that crisply displayed the information that would eventually print on paper IBM PCs offered green letters on a black background in just one font The higher quality Mac display enabled a what you see is what you get document creation process and started the desktop publishing revolution The Mac also introduced 3 inch floppy disks and its Motorola 68000 microprocessor could address more memory than the Intel 8088 in the IBM PC allowing the use of more sophisticated programs Microsoft hedged its bets by developing soft ware applications for the new Mac including the word processing program named Word and the spreadsheet named Multiplan Jobs and Gates per
16. e business Outside a brief flirtation with licensing in the mid 1990s Apple has maintained complete control of the design and manufacture of products that use its software This vertical integration greatly simplifies Apple s development efforts allowing it to bring out new versions of its operating system much more often than Microsoft has been able to Vertical integration also has benefits for customers in terms of reliability and service If you have a problem with hardware or software Apple has a strong incentive to fix it With the computer operating system and much of the soft ware supplied by a single vendor Mac users don t have to worry about being shuttled from company to company I m sorry but you ll have to contact Fly by Night Software to solve your movie editing bug it makes that applica tion Any problems with the extensive suite of software that comes witha Mac are Apple s problems There s only one neck to wring 16 S SS MBER Part I Informed Switching Starts Here Are Mac users too smug about viruses Computer industry pundits are continually warning Mac users that the pandemic of viruses worms Trojans and other malware that plagues the PC world will soon be coming to Macintosh users They ve been issuing these warnings for more than a decade as remem ber but that doesn t mean they won t be right someday The Mac market is no longer too small for virus writers to bother
17. ion port that lets users attach high performance devices without opening the box The PC world responded by developing its own fast expansion port USB 2 0 which Apple then adopted Now Apple and Intel have jointly developed an even faster way to hook up accessories Thunderbolt It s not easy to top a name like FireWire Thunderbolt packages on a wire the same PCI Express technology used in modern PC expansion slots It s a game changer with speeds up to 20 times faster than USB 2 0 and 12 times faster than FireWire 800 You can connect more than one device to a Thunderbolt port and it even doubles as a Mini DisplayPort so that you can hook a large video display to the end of that Thunderbolt daisy chain All new Macs offer Thunderbolt and USB 2 0 ports and many include a FireWire port allowing a wide range of accessories to be attached just by plug ging them in See Chapter 2 for an introduction to the Mac models now available Macs don t comply with industry standards Early in Apple s history Steve Wozniak a co founder of Apple and its engi neering genius came up with a clever way to squeeze more bits onto a floppy disk an early form of portable data storage Unfortunately this design made floppy disks written on early Macs unreadable on IBM PCs That gave Apple a reputation of being an odd duck from a standards standpoint Apple has never been able to shake that reputation completely even though it later ad
18. iques to keep up In 1997 Apple acquired NeXT and Steve Jobs rejoined the company soon taking the helm A year later he reinvigorated Apple sales with the iMac an all in one computer that echoed the original Macintosh A flat panel version appeared in 2002 Apple soon replaced its OS 9 operating system the lineage of which goes back to the first Macintosh with a new system Mac OS X based on the NeXT operating system The iPod was launched in 2001 In 2005 Jobs ended the personal computer microprocessor wars when he announced that Apple would switch to x86 Intel micropro cessors the same microprocessors used in Windows PCs All Macs manufactured since 2006 employ Intel microprocessors In 2007 Jobs introduced the Apple TV TV extend ing the Apple brand to the living room as well as the spiffy iPhone setting a new standard in mobile communication The companion iPod touch shares many iPhone features except the phone and has become a popular game platform In 2010 Apple introduced another revolutionary product the iPad replacing it a year later with the iPad 2 More than 425 000 inexpensive or free applications for the iPhone iPod touch and iPad are available online at the iTunes Store In 2010 Jobs announced that he was taking a leave of absence from day to day Apple man agement for health reasons though he was on hand at Apple s 2011 developer conference to introduce OS X Lion We wish him well 21
19. ntal scars inflicted by changing their baseball allegiance from the New York Yankees to the Boston Red Sox Some of them never recover and have to live the rest of their lives eking out a living writing books for technology novices This kind of psychological trauma doesn t have to happen to you just because you switch computer platforms Think of it this way The PC won the great war Apple was forced to abandon the Motorola processor family and convert to Intel Macs are now just PCs in more stylish packages with better software You re not abandoning your mother s cooking just sampling a different cuisine No matter what I say you probably won t completely escape the emotional side of switching to a Mac When you feel the shame of betrayal and the pangs of guilt coming on repeat this mantra It s just a computer It s just a computer It s just a computer An optional brief history of Apple You don t need to read this sidebar to make your decisions but no book on switching to the Mac would be complete without a little his tory of how Apple got where it is today None of the science fiction magazines that warped our formative minds dared to predict the level of computing power that we have beneath our fingertips or in our shirt pockets today Further no high tech story is as compelling as the legend of Steve and Bill two kids from the West Coast of the United States who revolutionized the world Ap
20. pent five years and billions of dollars developing the Vista operat ing system in part to end the scourge of computer viruses and spyware that have plagued the PC world for more than a decade After Vista proved to be Chapter 1 Why Switch Demystifying the Mac Mantra 15 an embarrassment Microsoft spent more years and more billions to rework it into Windows 7 During the same period Apple has been devoting its energy to improving its OS X operating system from the user s perspective While Windows 7 and Windows Vista were gestating Apple released six improved versions of OS X code named Jaguar Panther Tiger Leopard Snow Leopard and now Lion Someone at Apple likes big cats Perhaps Windows 8 will close the gap We ll see Considering All Aspects Advantage Apple Apple has adopted strategies that give it important advantages over the competition provided by Microsoft The following sections explore what you need to know about each one One neck to wring Microsoft sells its Windows operating system to dozens of companies that make personal computers This practice has benefits in that competition among these PC vendors keeps prices down but it also means that Microsoft has to support a bewildering variety of hardware designs and components This support includes not just all the variations now being sold but also products that are no longer being sold but are still in use including PCs made by companies that have left th
21. ple Computer was founded on April Fools Day 1976 by three young men Steve Jobs Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne Their original mission Sell low cost circuit boards on which hobbyists would build their own comput ers based on the newly invented microproces sor That mission quickly changed when Jobs found that a local electronics shop wanted more fully assembled systems and gave him an order for several dozen of them The price of the first Apple product the Apple I was 666 66 more than the price of today s far more capable Mac mini Adjusted for inflation the Apple would cost about 2 600 in 2011 dollars more than enough for a Mac Pro or a top of the line 27 inch iMac plus an iPad The Apple used a 6502 microprocessor which was considered to be easier to program than the early groundbreaking devices from Intel and Zilog and featured a BASIC interpreter BASIC is a particularly simple computer lan guage invented by Dartmouth professor John Kemeny to help teach programming A young programmer named Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard horrifying his parents to start a business selling software to the fledgling microcomputer industry He chose the imagi native name Microsoftfor his venture A BASIC continued 20 Part I Informed Switching Starts Here continued interpreter for microcomputers was the com pany s first product and Apple was among its earliest customers The choice of corporat
22. sonally negotiated a contract that let Microsoft sell a simplified version of the graphical interface named Microsoft Windows 1 0 When Microsoft later released a full blown graphical user interface in Windows 3 0 Apple sued but the courts ruled that it was covered by that one page contract Word became the flag ship word processor for Windows and Excel with a graphical interface like Multiplan s drove out Lotus 1 2 3 Jobs left Apple in 1985 after some disagree ments with the board of directors and started a new computer company NeXT It built a graphi cal interface on top of an operating system Chapter 1 Why Switch Demystifying the Mac Mantra named Unix that was developed by the American Telephone amp Telegraph Company AT amp T Unix was popular with computer researchers because of its flexible design and because a ver sion with source code was available Apple continued to introduce more powerful versions of the Macintosh adding hard drives laser printers and high resolution color dis plays Its share of the personal computer market continued to decline relative to IBM PCs and their clones In 1994 Apple switched from the Motorola 68000 series microprocessor to the PowerPC chip jointly developed by Motorola IBM and Apple The PowerPC was designed to allow programs to run faster than those run by the Intel chips but the theoretical advantage never materialized as Intel chip engineers used innovative techn
23. te our children and to manage our money They help us fix our homes cure our diseases and make new friends No one has time to fuss over them fix crashes fight viruses clean out hard drives figure out why the printer won t work reload the software or press Ctrl Alt Delete We need computers to be there when we want them For the most part Macs are there when we need them Macs just work Part I Informed Switching Starts Here Steve Jobs other company Steve Jobs helped found Apple and is widely credited with creating the company culture of excellence For ten years Jobs moonlighted in another job running Pixar Animation now part of Disney There have been many movie studios in the history of film but few have produced ten smash hits in a row Toy Story Toy Story 2 Toy Story 3 A Bug s Life Monsters Inc Finding Nemo The Incredibles Cars Ratatouille and Wall E All were critically acclaimed box office successes that made extensive use of the very latest in computer animation technology But the key to their popularity was subordinating the gee whiz special effects to the telling of a compelling story Want to know what makes Macs different Rent one of these movies Microsoft isn t run by a bunch of idiots The company is managed by some very smart people and it hires top notch engineers Just getting a product as complex as Windows out the door takes extraordinary talent But Windows is designed for
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