Posted on 07/29/2012 8:43:21 AM PDT by PreciousLiberty
I guess you could say I started cheating on Windows back in October of 2010.
That’s when Apple debuted the revamped MacBook Air. For the first time, I could resume working almost as soon as I flipped the lid on a laptop, thanks to the way the notebook leveraged its flash memory. (Intel and Ultrabook makers wouldn’t offer a similar instant-on experience until a year later.)
The Air was a work of art, but it didn’t feel complete until OS X Lion arrived last year. With key time-saving features like Auto Save and Mission Control for faster multitasking, I started leaving behind my Windows notebook more and more. Now that Mountain Lion is here, I may never look back. Here are 10 reasons why you might want to do the same.
(For details on the bullets, read the article.)
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
A few other points:
ping!
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But for business, Excel still rules.
I help companies design powerful and sophisticated solutions using Excel with VBA. VBA is just not available on Apple OS.
You could spend millions on a solution with SAP, but we could give you better functionality for $100,000.
I am tempted to make the upgrade. I didn’t move up to Lion because I read about some issues with my mid-’10 MacBook Pro. I may wait for a short time to see if the same thing happens with Mountain Lion. I know the Airplay will not work, but I don’t have any HDMI TV at this point, so no Apple TV for now. That may change in the near future as my WD Live TV Hub is on the fritz. Lots of other stuff that I like about Mountain Lion though that would be nice to have in integrating my iPhone, iPad and Mac.
“But for business, Excel still rules.”
To some extent, yes. Excel is of course available on Mac, though without ActiveX (it supports VBA IIRC).
“I help companies design powerful and sophisticated solutions using Excel with VBA. VBA is just not available on Apple OS.”
Well, that is one approach. A more modern and more powerful approach might be to develop Web applications using the full power of a backend like Java. That way you can easily support mobile devices, for one thing. Plus, you get to use a full-fledged computer language rather than scripting. ;-)
“You could spend millions on a solution with SAP, but we could give you better functionality for $100,000.”
That’s great. It should also be pointed out, though, that you can easily run a full Windows environment under MacOS using a VM - inside a sandbox to contain viruses and other Windows malware. The best of both worlds! :-)
There’s an old joke that if you want your home systems to be secure from visitors, stick to Windows equipment — Apple user “guests” won’t have a clue....
Mac’s et al. are great products for individual use, but where your business is 20+ years entrenched in MS you can’t afford to proselytize.
This "next-generation" MacBook Pro hasn't just caught up to the thin and powerful Windows laptops and ultrabooks on the market; it has surpassed them to become the high-end choice for media professionals, enthusiasts, and general Mac fans alike. As such, the MacBook Pro is our new Editors' Choice for high-end desktop replacement laptop PCs.
“You’ll spend much less time reinstalling the OS, uninstalling and reinstalling programs, fighting malware”
I was a Microsoft Slave for 13 long years - dreading calling support to listen to an Indian voice tell me it was “time to reinstall the operating system.” Yea, apparently, it self-destructs.
Beyond that, I provided years of free technical support to myself and others, Googling solutions to figure out how to fix Microsoft products. I have more actual time devoted to using my computers now, instead of fixing them.
I switched to a MacBook Pro about 5 years ago. Never a virus. I check once a month, but feel like the Maytag repair man. Every update installed flawlessly the first time. I have a VM set up to run Windows XP occasionally, to access a program I still must use at work. It sucks to boot it up and watch the agonizing process begin of Windows updates, Virus updates, etc.
Is OSX perfect? Of course not. Nothing is. Does it work? That’s my experience. Does it self-destruct? Apparently, that process, if true, takes more than 5 years.
To each their own.
As I pointed out elsewhere, today's Macs will run Windows just fine, particularly in a VM.
This is a great solution as you move from legacy software to something better. With so much business software being done as web applications now, the target machine and OS are becoming less important than the supported browser. Bill Gates rightly feared the browser software platform, and Windows is certainly being marginalized due to it.
We'll see if Apple starts to set it's sights more in the direction of "the enterprise". As most highly capitalized company on the stock exchange, it can certainly afford to do so.
I went the other way and dropped OS X for Windows 8. I was a beta tester for Mountain Lion back in the winter. I realized early on that there was nothing particularly innovative or exciting about Mountain Lion. Its primarily designed to help sell more iPhones, which is Apple’s primary cash cow these days. OS X has gotten boring, and while it is becoming more like iOS, its pretty much the same as 10.7 or 10.6.
In contrast, Windows 8 is a tremendous leap forward. I tried it on a lark in a virtual machine, but I was so impressed I sold my MacBook and bought a ThinkPad. Now I run Windows 8 as my full time OS. Visually, its gorgeous. Once you get used to it (takes a couple of days) you realize that along with the beautiful Metro apps, its easier to navigate and use than the traditional Windows desktop. In my opinion, Apple has gotten lazy and is resting on its laurels, charging a lot of money for itoys, and Microsoft has kicked itself in the butt and become the innovator. Tech pundits will bitch and moan about Windows 8 at first because change is difficult, but I think it will be a huge hit with Microsoft’s customers.
Sorry. FR needs an "edit" function.
Sorry about that. We'll see how it works out for you. :-)
"Tech pundits will bitch and moan about Windows 8 at first because change is difficult, but I think it will be a huge hit with Microsoft’s customers."
I tend to think PC World is a bit closer to the mark:
Windows 8's Metro UI: 7 Things You May Just HateMaybe it'll be better by the third version... =:-DThe brightly colored, interactive tiles of Windows 8's Metro interface are fun and innovative. But they can also be frustrating and completely unintuitive to use.
You might also be interested in Does Windows 8 succeed as a true tablet operating system?
(After discussing how much of the system uses the old, non-touch interface...)
None of these are particularly weird or wacky things to want to do. In Android, iOS, or even Windows Phone, all can be done comfortably with an interface designed for touch. This creates a tremendous problem. Android and iOS are the competition, and their proponents can point to these parts of Windows 8 and make a very credible argument that, for all the thought and care and work that have gone into the touch parts, it's only half of a real tablet operating system.And they'd have a good point.
I am not an apple drone per se. But, several years ago I made the switch for an iMac. The reason? I use my machine primarily for photoshop and other graphic programs. At the time I was having to restart my MS machine two or three times a day. It would take about five or six minutes to cycle down and back up. That’s about fifteen minutes a day. About an hour and a half a week. About a full work week per year.
When I realized I was spending a full work week per year watching my computer restart, I had to make a change.
The Mac needs to do that once a day.
The rest of it is BS. My time is worth it.
A unix based OS should never need rebooting. Stopping an application should be all that is necessary. That is the beauty of unix, the OS and the apps are completely divorced and run in separate memory locations. When I did system admin at IBM we had unix servers that had be up for years without a reboot.
By the way, I meant to point out that your "old joke" is "really lame".
For starters, wouldn't the vast majority of your "visitors" be familiar with Windows?
I think a much better approach regardless of OS is called "password protection". And not the Windows user favorite password, "password", either.
All of that ignores the fact that most Apple users are quite computer literate, and a whole lot of them like aMorePerfectUnion, Vermont Lt, and myself have a lengthy and painful history with Windows. Life is much better now.
But it still doesn't work for business applications.
Some solutions we developed:
• Turned a two week per month sales commission process for a national distributor of medical devices into a 30 minute clerical task. The other benefit was that ‘knowledge transfer’ of the commission process took place between the staff and the tool, reducing the risk of talent flight in a critical administrative role
• Turned 1,500 paper stock LTI agreements (In duplicate!) into an electronic process for a national insurance company
• Created 5,000 salary and bonus planning tools with a click of the mouse, with email distribution, and automated tool consolidation and reporting
• Created a ‘calculator’ for an international oil company as they rolled out a new expatriate pay program, so current and potential expats can see the actual result of the change
There is no shortage of information in any company. What is missing is the enabling technology to bring the data into an actionable view at a reasonable cost. Without the enabling technology, information integration and analysis is turned into more work - a manual process, with macros, multiple ‘cut and paste’ and repetitive tasks. This is where the hours in the day are stolen from higher value work.
You can pay millions for an ERP, or get better functionality with Excel and VBA for a fraction. Yes, it is not ‘sexy’ technology, but it delivers value for business.
My wife has a Powerbook and LOVES it. I’m still running XP on a desktop. Maybe I’ll bite that bullet and switch.
* I can't afford to pay double for the same technical hardware specs.
* I already have thousands of dollars in software for Windows.
Did you know that Excel was originally written for the Mac?
All the PC people poo-pooed it at the time. That was way back when Gates worked with Jobs, and before Gates decided to go to the dark side.
I know, because I used Excel on my Mac back then, and had to tolerate the sneers of my “professional” friends who refused to even try Excel.
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