PC to Mac: My Not-So-Genius Switch - Page 32  

So for you, they're not a bargain, that's fine. Doesn't change that for me, they are.

Well grawk that makes two of us they are a bargain for me also especially since a friend
will give half what I paid for it if and when I upgrade to a new MBP this summer.

Unibody 17" vs. old-school 17"

I just thought I'd comment on this since I too got a previous-gen 17" after a unibody.

I too switched from PC to Mac late last year, a little earlier than Jude did. I have a long history with Macs but had been PC-only for most of the last decade. There was no one thing that was "the breaking point" for my switch, but a major factor was that I was moving overseas and wanted to simplify the heck out of my over-full home office/computing lab. I'd been using a Mac laptop part-time over several months and had grown to find it a more accomodating, less intrusive working experience than my PCs, so I decided to make Mac my main environment going forward. Your mileage may vary, etc., etc., but that's the choice that I made. (I did ship my primary PC over as part of the move, but three months later I've yet to bother to turn it on.)

I bought one of the new 15-inch unibody MBPs but unlike Jude I had no hardware issues whatsoever. Beautiful looking, solid as a rock, works great.

After a few months I did decide I wanted the extra screen real estate and extra USB port of the 17-inch model, though. By this time the unibody 17" was available, but you could still get the last of the old-style 17" machines as well.

I decided on the old-style 17 instead of the new one. The unibody has some advantages (the trackpad feel is lovely, it stays cooler than the old ones, it has the dual GPUs, it's pretty, and the massive new battery sure sounds nice) but also two big drawbacks for me: First, the keyboard is simply less suited to my typing style than the old one, which is much more responsive to short, light strokes. Other people may well feel differently about the two keyboards, but the difference is a big deal for me. The other drawback of the unibody is that the edge of the case is so aggressively right-angled, with no visible rounding or bevelling at all, that I was actually finding it cut uncomfortably into my forearms during long sessions. The rounding on the edge of the old-style 17" MBP is visually minute, but is sufficient to prevent that.

There's one other thing about the old-style 17 that I like better, which is that there's less backlight leakage around the keytops: only the keytops themselves are really illuminated, while on the unibody models each keytop is surrounded by a little halo of illumination. This is a super nitpick on my part and wouldn't have been a deciding factor at all, but I like the old model's illumination better.

The new trackpad is what I like most about the new MBP's and I know that is not a valid
reason to upgrade as there are more than that but after using the new trackpad I want it.

The new trackpad feels great, gives you a biiig button to push (if you're into clicking and not just tapping) and supports more gestures than the old one -- pinch/expand, three-fingered swipe and four-fingered swipe. If you care about trackpad feel or capability the way I care about keyboard feel, then over the life of the computer those things add up. It's not such a terrible reason to upgrade, if it matters to you.

Make that three of us, me included!

i didn't like the big click-pad at first (was setting up some stuff for my mom), but after a while i went by to my older macbook and found myself missing that. and i truly hate trackpads that respond to taps (without clicking).

the only thing i really dislike about the macbooks is the case-edging. it can get very uncomfortable after a while, and i've often thought about just filing it to be more curved. haven't gotten around to it yet though.

What a worthless article. Once again, Mac users write about PCs like everyone's still running Windows 98.

The last good operating system was DOS 6.22.

You must be to young to have used DOS 6.22.

I've been using PCs for a long time. My first machine was a Windows 3.1 setup, that ran on top of DOS 6.22. Usually stayed out of it, but whenever I wanted to play a crappy DOOM knockoff or some random PC game I got from Wal-Mart on the cheap, I'd have to use the DOS interface. I upgraded the machine a couple years ago (yes, my mother was routinely using Windows 3.11 until 2006) and played around with DOS while I had it. Hadn't appreciated what a fine system it was before that, but I maintain that it's really all you need. Spellcheck and CSS-compatible web browsing are for the weak.

Be a hero and use an Abacus of course a modern OS will speed up productivity and be
more fun to use.

I love the flexibility that PCs offer. I can customize my machine with any set of parts I feel like and I can build a very solid machine for almost dirt cheap. Building and setting up a Windows PC from scratch only takes a few hours max and it's a fun experience. There's just no excitement in buying a machine off the shelf and plugging it in.

I defend anyone who wants to build and modify anything for the rest of us that just want to push a button or turn a knob and it works well the percentage is high and we enjoy that also.