The Switch? Considering OS X...

[DavidNZ]

My wife brought home an iBook with Tiger running on it, so I decided to spend some quality time playing around. I started with Windows 3.11 years and years ago, but switched to a Mac in '92. I spent the better part of four years in the Mac environment, owning a series of machines (LC II, IIci, and a Powerbook 160). I switched back to Windows because it was the dominant operating system being used the University where I was undertaking grad work. Thus, I hadn't had a decent play on a Mac since System 7.5.5 (still have the floppies!).

Anyway, after a few hours of researching on the net, here are the only three reasons that I can think of why I might NOT switch:

1. I'm a huge user of Onenote. So much so that my Onenote 'notebook' is almost 100MB, and has notes, web clippings, news items, and half-finished writings. Put simply, a new Mac wouldn't be able to read the .one files. This is the major brick wall preventing me from switching.

2. I archive all of my email by year, so I have separate personal .pst files for 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. Every week, I empty my Inbox in Outlook into the 2006 pst file. Using Copernic Desktop Search, those pst files are indexed, making finding an email from, say, two years ago, a snap. I'm not sure how easy it is to import those .pst files into Mail (for Mac) but it seems easy enough for Entourage given it's a Microsoft product. Still, I worry that I will not be able to index them once imported, but am still investigating that.

3. I have a Sony HD5 network walkman (sound quality FAR superior to the Ipod in my opinion) and thus use SonicStage to transfer ATRAC3+ audio files. Not compatible with Mac.

#2 is likely solveable, but #1 is the bottleneck. I can get by without #3 being solved as I'll always have a Windows box at home that I can use for this.

Just thought I would share...

David

[carbon_unit]

Would this do what you want for all three items?
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/

[DIGITALgimpus]

There's pretty good evidence OneNote is coming to Mac OS X in the somewhat near future.

[kulivontot]

There's always boot camp, but the way I see it, if you're justifying buying a mac because you need windows, you might as well just stick to a windows pc (like a new thinkpad for example ) I see your reasons for NOT switching, but what reasons do you have to justifiably switching? OS X is great, I've come to realize that it is indeed a viable alternative to windows. However, for me it is still too limiting and I'll end up falling back to windows anyway.

[DavidNZ]

1. Parallels is indeed interesting. At least it lets you run OSX and XP simultaneously. Forgot about that; thanks, carbon_unit.

2. DIGITALgimpus: From what I can tell, they've been saying that Onenote is coming to mac for *years*, but what they seemed to have actually done with Office 2004 for the Mac is build in Onenote-like features into the Word app. Still can't read .one files. Given that Onenote doesn't exactly enjoy a huge user base in the Windows environment, I doubt they'll port it over the Mac. The problem with running parallels, as I see it, is that I use Onenote with multiple other programs running. I know you need 2GB of RAM to run parallels properly, but not sure how logical it is to be switching OSes (kind of like <ALT>-<TAB> all the time) to access one program. Then again, I suppose that it is designed to do...I must do more research on this.

3. kulivontot: Good idea flipping it around, i.e., 'what are compelling reasons for switching'? That's a good way to think of it. I guess if I had to answer: 'a change'. I'm due to replace my X40 in June of 2007 (when the warranty runs out) and it'll be interesting to see how the features of Vista (if it's out) and Apple's new Leopard OS compare. Seeing as virtualisation is pretty hot these days (with Boot Camp and Parallels, VMWare and all that) we'll see what happens.

At the end of the day, a new X series with a Merom chip might just be the direction I head, but not ruling anything out at the moment.