My experiences moving from PC to Mac

Recently my PC motherboard died and at the same time it became apparent I was sold a fake copy of windows, so I decided I would finally try a Mac. So I purchased a Mini Mac as a HTPC and I had been eyeing up Macbook Pro anyways I picked up an i5 powered one for photo processing and general laptop use.

I have been a widows user for a years and have been getting some ace results for audio, but have always had a mac in the house as my girlfriend is a designer, so I know how to use them pretty well and the form factor on the Mac Mini is better than anything I could buy/build and run windows on.

So I now have 3 macs in the house and one shared 5TB Nas. No PC in sight. Vickys Macbook, my Macbook pro and a mini plugged into the TV, supernait and AV2.

Mac Mini as a HTPC

Finally HDMI, this makes life so much easier! The HTPC is really just used for Music, Spotify, iplayer, youtube, web and photo browsing as well as the occasional movie.

I will not comment on audio quality as I have gone from a PC with a ESI Juli@ soundcard running FLAC in foobar (WASAPI). I don't think the comparison is fair until I get a Hiface Evo plugged in, because the difference right now is significant.

One thing I struggled with on the Mini was the inability to bring Safari and Finder up in full screen, the green + does not fill the screen. I find this annoying, luckily Firefox runs full screen straight away and I hear there is a way of dragging and saving the size of the finder screen. I am getting there but its not intuitive. But I have working out how to get around this, shame FF opens so slowly though…

The biggest issue I am having is the lack of keyboard support from Logitech, I have been using a diNovo Mini on my old PC since it was released, for me it’s the perfect handheld keyboard. While it pairs and works with the Mini, not all the keys work as they should and the killer is the missing zoom function for web browsing. Shame it does just work, but I am looking at solutions for it.

Currently I am luke warm with it. Hard wear performance & form factor awesome, but stock OSX certainly needs a lot of tweaking to get right on a TV, the whole full screen thing is so frustrating especially as the coverflow works so well….but in a reduced window.  I find myself switching back to windows (Bootcamp) for web browsing, as the keyboard works perfectly under windows, often it stays in windows for the rest fo the time.

MacBook Pro for photo editing

Vicky has been going on for AGES I need a Mac for photo editing etc etc, it is the industry standard. The Pro is a piece of art, there is just nothing on the market that seems to compete for quality, albeit expensive. There are 2 main applications I use, Lightroom and DXO, which is a batch lens correction and barrel distortion tool.

On the laptop I do not get frustrated with the lack of full screen safari and finder (thought I have already switched to FF), the OS is a dream to use, though I was getting issue on startup where Lightroom did not see the network drives until they were mounted (see learning the lingo!), so some research and some Unix coding I have written a script that mounts the drives on start up, it was fiddly but works.

But I had some concerns when I started doing some batch work with DXO, and felt the processing time was a bit slow. So I bootcamped windows 7 and the results were interesting so I did the same on the Mini as a comparison – converting 5 identical raw files on each.

Macbook pro i5 4gb 2.4ghz:
Win 7 - 1.31min
osx - 2.52min

Minimac 2.4 core 2 duo 2gb (current model):
win 7 - 2.18min
osx - 5.04min

So I emailed DXO and got the following response:

“I run Optics Pro on both Window 7 under boot camp on a quad Mac Pro, and a OS X copy under OS X 10.6.6 on a second Mac Pro quad. To be honest, this is a comparison of apples (so to speak) and oranges. Since the programs are coded differently due to their respective operating systems, it is difficult to accurately determine where any slowness starts.

I will tell you this. Windows 7 runs like a bat on the Mac Pro. Better than any PC I have seen it run on. I believe that the hardware configuration in a Mac is more to the liking of Windows 7 (VISTA stinks on a Mac Pro). What you are seeing is the speed increase due to the efficiency of Win 7 running on the Mac.

I have suggested at the local Microsoft store that they should have Win 7 running on a Mac Pro. Of course, they snickered and walked off playing with their Dells and HPs. My older Mac Pro will smoke their new systems any day of the week running Windows 7. And, the speed at which major Windows programs open is astonishing. Word and Excel 2011 open in 5-10 seconds on my new Mac Pro. Word and Excel 2010 open in under 2 seconds under Windows 7 on the older Mac Pro. Coincidence? I don't think so.”

I must say I am thoroughly disappointed by the OSX performance with DXO - for me thsi should be the bread and butter of OSX, I hope it is only related to this one application, but I plan to do some testing on other batch applications, such as photoshop to see how they perform differently. Results will be interesting. I will keep this post updated,  I really want to give OSX a go and especially love the much reduced chance of virus, but so far I have come across more disadvantages than advantages