Comments on: The Big Switch from Windows to Mac OS X

By: tmarkiewicz

tmarkiewicz — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:16:46 +0000

Alan – not sure what the issue may be there. I'm not sure on the average lifespan of a hard drive, but yours are lasting a bit over three years. I usually put a backup plan into action from day one assuming my drive will crash at some point. What are the variables here? Same brand of hard drive? model?

By: Alan

Alan — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:06:23 +0000

I bought my first home computer in 1999 – a slot loading blueberry imac – which can still run OS9 and the OSx beta on a partition due to some date fiddling – so mac for 11 years at home but I am approaching my 3rd hard drive crash on my aluminium 20inch intel imac 1997 – vista runs beautifully on my boot camp partition – I don't know I love the mac OS always have but 3 broken hard drives in 10 years? is that good or bad?

By: Partners in Grime

Partners in Grime — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:39:14 +0000

Great article and comments!

By: Tom Markiewicz » NewsGator’s RSS feed reading clients are now free

Tom Markiewicz » NewsGator’s RSS feed reading clients are now free — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:44:58 +0000

[...] written about NewsGator’s products in the past and NetNewsWire is one application on my Mac I couldn’t live without. And before my Mac, [...]

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:01:29 +0000

Hi Tom, et al,

I was just surfing by. The article and conversation that follows was a good read. Thank you.

I’ve been in IT since the early 80’s and a PC user all these years. Though I can’t drop MS altogether due to my skill set, and the requirements of food, clothing and shelter; I find myself more & more disillusioned with the computing world Microsoft has wrought upon us.

At it’s beginning as an underdog to IBM’s incompetence, to breaking Novell’s stranglehold in PC networking, it was a pleasure to watch it grow. Somewhere along the line, alarm bells started to go off, as MS became a juggernaut more interested in crushing innovation than bringing it about.

Aside from the convoluted underpinnings of the Windows franchise, the DRM initiative in Vista, which only benefits MS and the media conglomerates is the final straw for me. I don’t like the world MS has fashioned and I’ll be voting with my wallet shortly.

I’m on the fence between Ubuntu and Mac, leaning towards Mac due to applications. Oh, I’ll still use MS cruft as I still make a living wallowing in it, but the winds of change are coming. What Gates evangelized, to bring legions of corporate minions to his side, Ballmer’s bug-eyed rants and collusion will destroy.

I hope Apple continues to innovate, as it had to, in order to stay alive. My concern is for the future and vendor lock-in (and the only reason for my fence-sitting). Microsoft too, had a better take on things than IBM or Novell, yet the current OS and application stranglehold it has world-wide, feels no less a burden these days.

The ray of hope I see is Steve’s rally-cry against DRM (while still providing it), and the move away from a dead-end processor to Intel. I’d feel better if Apple embraced AMD as a second-source to Intel in its hardware designs. Intel’s self-absorbed malaise went nowhere in the last decade, until AMD provided a wake-up call.

It’s all about choice, competition, and innovation. If Apple embraces alternate vendors (AMD), and drops AT&T as a single-source provider for the iPhone, it may find a watershed moment when all of us fence-sitting minions of Microsoft move towards the light.

Thanks again for the article… best of luck.

By: Andy Reilly

Andy Reilly — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:56:23 +0000

Stumbled across this page on some random surfing. As a Mac user since 1990 and an IT professional in a Windows shop, I get to see both sides of the coin. I actually use Ubuntu as my desktop machine at work and run VMWare for Windows needs. That said, Linux is NOT a ‘pleasurable’ experience as a desktop environment, unless you actually feel more comfortable at the command line. It should at least WARN you the first time it breaks half of your apps because you clicked the ‘Updates are ready’ button. Then I found PC-BSD. It’s kind of the Ubnuntu equivalent of BSD. And if you are used to the Mac command line, BSD is of course more comfortable. It installs software in packages much like the OS X “.app” containers. Storage is soooo cheap and large these days that I don’t care if 10 different programs that use the same lib file each have their own copy, it’s not going to amount to much wasted space. This way, new versions of programs don’t break other programs, and updates to your OS have less impact when the distro maintainers decide to update versions of these files in the OS. Check it out http://pcbsd.org/ .

By: Tom Markiewicz

Tom Markiewicz — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 23:10:31 +0000

@Motorcycle Guy – good point, but that’s their whole business model. Apple is in the hardware business not software. Just look at their current product lineup.

By: Motorcycle Guy

Motorcycle Guy — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 15:37:35 +0000

My main problem with switching to apple, is that it means less choice about what kind of hardware I run my pc on. Sure it might not seem like much of a difference now, but I don’t see that strategy as exactly promoting innovation. If you could buy OSX separately I might have switched a long time ago. I mean I know apple builds nice machines but to me its about choice too.

By: Sascha Kulawik

Sascha Kulawik — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 13:47:34 +0000

I even switched to Mac OS X because of Vista and will try to blog my way under http://www.kulawik.de. It's very funny, so much people are doing that these days!

By: James Sawyer

James Sawyer — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:56:42 +0000

Hey Tom,
We met several months back up at Knowledgeworks. You made the right move getting a Mac. I’ve never had anything but. And you know, you rarely hear about anyone going the other direction, from Mac to PC. Just like you rarely hear a waitress say, “Is Coke okay?” when they order a Pepsi.

Let’s talk soon,
JS