There has probably never been an easier time to switch to a mac! The new MacBooks are the most awesome mac yet! I’m another long-time apple user who has also always had to do Wintel PCs at work. The basic commands are essentially the same now and there’s no more guessing where the power button is the way you had to do 20 years ago. <g>
I have three macs at home, including a 1997 Powerbook 3400 that I souped up with a wireless card so I can surf for recipes in the kitchen (it still works after twelve years!!). I also use my seven year old ibook on occasion, but I just had to get the new MacBook because of the features and disk size. Since 2007, I’ve been able to run XP on a Mac so well that I can easily run my three PC-only apps on XP through Parallels on the Mac, though, to be honest, I find my self using those programs less as I move to other similar options on the Mac.
The graphics on the Mac are amazing. I could wax on about how fun it is to watch downloaded video podcasts of the Animal Whisperer on my 13” MacBook, or the video montages I’ve made of recent trips and family gatherings.
FYI for anyone thinking about buying a Mac and installing XP on it to run those one or two apps not available for a Mac: Get parallels, not bootcamp. I’ve used both and Bootcamp has the huge disadvantage of requiring a reboot every time you toggle between Mac and PC. I uninstalled Bootcamp after a couple months and replaced it with Parallels, which I love. Parallels operates as a window within the Mac OS, so you can work in both environments simultaneously.
You will need to make sure you keep your virus program updated if you install any Wintel system on your machine, but you should really do that anyway. Macs aren’t necessarily virus-free, but they are such a small percentage of the computer market that most hackers don’t bother to write viruses to disable Macs when they have the potential to shut down most of the corporate world by writing viruses for PCs.
