PC to MAC
I'm a die- hard Mac user and I have been for lots of years. I have, however, helped probably a half-dozen or more of my friends become "switchers". In fact, one friend who's a long-time software engineer, was worried that he'd have to run his two machines side-by-side for several months copied all the files he needed over from his PC the day he got the Mac. In his words, "My PC sat next to my mac for a week, running, but I never accessed it. After about a week, I finally just turned it off and stuck it in the closet."
Now, to answer your specific questions: > Has anyone else out there made the switch from PC to Mac before? > What were your experiences? Best practices? This is going to be highly dependent on how you use your computer. If you consider yourself a power-user, you might have some PC habits that don't translate well to the Mac environment. That's not bad, it'll just take a few weeks to unlearn them and figure out if there are decent analogs in MacOS.
IMVHO, the absolute very best book you can buy is Robin William's "The Little Mac Book" (no, not the comedian). I've owned several editions of this book, and it's clever and helpful and funny (cute). This is *not* a technical book; more a clean intro to Mac paradigms. There are also probably several "Switcher" books on the market now.
> Any thoughts or issues I should be looking out for? The main thing is that just like pretty much any other endeavor, there is a huge (free) support system on the Internet and in person. Consider joining CapMac, the local Macintosh User Group. Also, you can participate in the discussion forums and knowledge base at Apple's website -- I've had great success there.
Lastly, just because it's a Macintosh does not mean it's infallible or above criticism. There are times when the "One, True Menu Bar" will get annoying, or other such idiosyncrasies. Overall, it's a computer system, just like Linux or Windows or Amiga or Solaris. I've known people who switched and then re-switched back to Windows because, according to them, "Everything was different and I couldn't figure anything out. Things just didn't make sense."
Good luck, and please don't hesitate to send me any questions offline from Bootstrap.
-daniel -- http://www.hedrick.org/daniel?sig
